Re: [opensuse-ambassadors] event report from LCA

On Friday 11 February 2011 02:27:38 Tim Serong wrote:

On 2/10/2011 at 06:38 PM, Graham Lauder wrote:

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We need to prepare earlier, I should have made more noise about it than just putting it up on the events list. I shall make a point of it for next year.

Please do, I don't think I'll make it again next year and we have more openSUSE people in Au - I know because I met a few. We 'just' have to get you all to talk :D

I would prefer you to be there, consider this last one as an exploratory trip, there was no planning, no goals set so it only ended up as a flag waving exercise. I was struggling back when I first mentioned it, to convey the significance of LCA, there was a tone initially that was slightly dismissive. You have, however, now seen it for yourself. You also impressed in the lightning talks, that's a plus, people remember that when it comes to handing out speaking engagements.... and believe me the speakers get looked after, I was a speakers Limo driver in wellington! :) Go back over the speakers lists and you'll see what I mean, Linus, Shuttleworth, Maddog, Cerf, Phipps and so on not to mention high powered Politicos and others.

I've been to the last four LCAs (Melbourne, Hobart, Wellington, Brisbane), and AFAICT openSUSE (or SLES/SLED for that matter) was almost invisible. IBM, HP, RedHat and Canonical have often (always?) been sponsors at one level or another, and (subjectively) most presenters seemed to be running something Ubuntu/Debian-ish or RedHat/Fedora (or OSX). The same is true at LUV (http://luv.asn.au/) meetings in Victoria - RedHat sponsors the venue for monthly meetings, and most presenters don't seem to be running anything SUSE-related.

In Wellington I think the only SUSE present was when I did a preconference session on Presentations (http://www.lca2010.org.nz/wiki/Tutorials/Avoiding_the_Presentation_Nightmare) The last conf I went to where there was a strong presence was Sydney and Andreas Girardet was handing out little magnetic Geeko toys, brilliant, especially when he stuck them all around the Ubuntu booth at the open day. Fair got their tits in a tangle! :D

At LCA2011 I was delighted to see openSUSE mentioned as a fairy penguin sponsor at the LCA 2011 opening (shame we somehow didn't get mentioned during the close). I was similarly happy to see Sander van Vugt's "Setting up a HA cluster in 20 minutes" talk at the sysadmin miniconf presented on SLES. For the talk Florian Haas and I gave, my laptop was running openSUSE, and the demo toward the end was on SLES 11 SP1 with some openSUSE VMs (http://linuxconfau.blip.tv/file/4719948/ if y'all are interested), but really this wasn't obvious except when running the demo, due to the nature of the presentation. Apparently there were a few happy openSUSE users up the back of the room at the time, and Jos and I met a gentleman (whose name I am embarrassed to say eludes me) at open day who is/was a keen openSUSE/SUSE user, but who had lost his local Novell contact (the latter moved interstate I believe).

That's been a problem over the last couple of years. Novell has only one guy left in NZ as far as I can tell although there is an office in Wellington which seems to be shared. I got DVDs sent there before the Wgtn conf but there was noone in residence when I went to pick them up. Just a bunch of receptionists. So their presence is low indeed.

So, yeah, I think we've got some work to do :)

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I can even see some topics in my minds eye already. We go to LCA, we go for a reason and with a set of goals that would be good to achieve. Given not so recent, almost ancient, history we have to sell openSUSE to the wider linux dev community big time. We have disappeared off the map down here we need to re-establish ourselves.

FWIW, I am aware of some reasonable-sized corporate deployments of SLES in .au, but this obviously hasn't translated to mass usage or knowledge of openSUSE.

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We could even give the trip a title: "LCA 2012, Paint Ballarat Green."

Cute :)

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Raise profile, set a different image in the minds of the conf attendees, provide some good high value talks that people will talk about afterwards. People see other people committed to their distro of choice, having fun and creating an excellent piece of software and they will want to participate.

Agreed.

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We need to present a heap of abstracts from Community members, present a miniconf proposal, tutorials and equip for big splash at the OpenDay.

They are out there, since LibreOffice forked under the Document Foundation, the community has added 92 developers. Mageia has forked Mandriva under a similar community model and is looking like it will build similar numbers or more. So they are out there if they feel welcomed.

I see Tim Serong introed as a new Ambassador, Helen has said she'll be in Ballarat, presumably Tim will too, with that sort of commitment I don't mind putting my hand up as well, but it's not worth my while for something half baked, it has to be planned, effective and supported by the community and the corporate partner.

Yep, I'll be there. Thanks for the ambassadorial welcome too, everybody :)

Bloody good to have you board, there is noise floating about that there is going to be a proposal from either Auckland or Hamilton for 2013. That'll make it a lot easier to attend, for me anyway, but then I'll probably be helping with the org.

Regards,

Tim

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