Akademy and openSUSE Conference

It's been a insane 7-8 days. Starting with Akademy, where I gave just one talk but still have notes on 5 or 6 sessions to send to the mailing lists, followed up with the openSUSE conference where I give 3 workshops, 3 talks and a keynote, luckily not all unique or alone. The latter is still happening, I just wanted to share some thoughts ;-)

Akademy...

... was awesome as always. I really like that the community is moving forward with thinking about the future. The manifesto is of course a first step but there were BoF sessions talking about the position of KDE e.V. and how it relates to other projects which might want to join us or that we work with; and I ran a session with Valorie and Peter on how to deal with the dark side of community - the least fun moments. (I'll mail to the community ML about this)

Now I am aware that some of these things don't move as quickly as many would like. The manifesto is great but also excluding projects and people many of us actually don't want to exclude. And I bet that beyond that there is even more room for KDE e.V. to play a role, say in helping other FOSS organizations handle GSOC money or even more. Or think about our relationship to Qt...

Meanwhile, I'm of course still concerned with the Marketing side of things. At my presentation I put forward some strategic thoughts from the KDE Marketing Workgroup in this area and there was some good feedback, also in the BoF session about this. If you're on the promo list you can expect mail some time next week.

And many thanks to Carl and everybody at Akademy in helping getting articles out on the dot! It was real team work and that does not only lead to better results but is also a whole lot more fun... Awesome!

openSUSE Conference

Like Akademy, I spend the first oSC day running around, talking to people. And having a few more hours of meeting-with-the-board than I care for. The keynote by Georg however was a great start of the day (see article on news) and I must say the Greeks have outdone, well, everybody. There is a lot of creativity and fun everywhere - from the beach ball shooting (at the audience...) in the welcoming talk to the small pools outside, the style of the event is just awesome. Lots of fun.

On the content side, I really enjoyed talk by Alexjan Carraturo. He pointed out many hard issues with promoting Linux in Italy. And he's an excellent speaker, too - his English might be a tad Italian but it is not hard to follow and his presentation and slides are awesome. Most importantly, he brings up a lot of real excellent, interesting issues which the local team bumps into. From political and economical to social. They have found very creative solutions like the 'openSUSE Live USB station' where people can put in a USB stick and get their live openSUSE on it or using bare ARM board to draw people into the booth.

Max Huang (sakana) gave a great talk on how things are going in Taiwan - amazingly much better. Where Alexjan brought up the many troubles he and his fellow Geekos (and tuxies and more) run into, Max seems almost exhausted by the many open source events taking place in Taiwan! He showed some impressive numbers and facts about what is going on in Asia - clearly, that's where we, as FOSS community, need to put more focus.

Before these two ambassadors sharing their experience, Richard and myself spoke about new directions in the ambassador program and merchandising handling. Of course there were many, many more talks but I haven't seen that many and the above did catch my attention mostly because this is the area I care strongly about...

Currently I'm listening to the openSUSE Board talk about technical directions for openSUSE in response to a question. SUSE has some ideas on that and is sharing those with the community at this event, which is an interesting experience.

oSC isn't over yet and there is much more to come, I look forward to much of that ;-)

(edit: fixed some stupidity with names, I wrote this too quickly)