LCA 2011 event report

Hi all!

I've recovered from LCA 2011 and took the time to write an event report for the marketing team. You can find it here. A quick summary:

• Event Details
• It is a well organized and quite professional conference. Biggest sponsors HP, IBM, Intel and Google. Budget about $700.000, entry fee from $60 to $600 (depending if you're student, hobbyist or professional and if you get early bird registration (50% off). There are about 1000 people there, mostly semi-regulars, few students. Most of them quite technical and experienced.
• Arrived Tuesday night, Wednesday first day of the conference for me but the conf starts on Monday with small sessions.
• results
• Attended talks, among others by Red Hat/Fedora ppl Learned about Koji and how it is quite a bit behind on OBS (which is probably also due to a different focus. Either way, forget about cross compiling, it runs locally, has to be controlled from the command line etc)
• Got in contact with a few local (open)SUSE people, will try to help them to set up more of a community in AU.
• Realized many people want to spread openSUSE but don't know how. They used to have local Novell contacts but those disappeared (layoffs, personnel changes) and now they're lost. I will try and get them motivated to become openSUSE ambassador. Need to expand our ambassador program, communicate it better and work with the local Novell/SUSE offices, integrate their work with local (open)SUSE people and the ambassador work!
• Had a meeting with Fedora Project Lead. We discussed cross-distro collaboration. There will be a discussion panel on that on FOSDEM lead by him and the Debian project lead, I will join them.
• Communication
• Gave a 90 second lightning talk (24 slides about SUSE Studio) during the closing ceremony which earned me a t-shirt (winner best lightning talk). Resulted in ppl coming up to the booth all Saturday to say they would check out openSUSE and SUSE Studio (again)
• Held a booth on Saturday together with Tim, local Novell/SUSE employee and openSUSE volunteer. Answered many questions.
• Created 1 A4 poster with the marketing team to get geeks' interest, gave away about 40 and used it in booth area
• Gave away 150 DVD's, rest is with 2 local openSUSE ppl now.
• Conclusion
• This conference is certainly worth going to but needs more marketing materials and more people, a team!