openSUSE Conference is Over – Some Wrap Up

On Sunday the first openSUSE conference (osc09) finished in Nuernberg, Germany. Overall it was great success and brought people face to face together. Participants were motivated and enthusiastic and we’d like to just show some comments on twitter/blog:

• ‚ÄúFolks! I‚Äôm hoooome! #oSC09 was a blast! More details to come BryenY‚Äù

• ‚ÄúBack from the #opensuse conference #osc09, back to work. Had a great time‚Äù

• ‚ÄúBack from the _awesome_ openSUSE #osc09 conference. Learnt a lot. Huge kudos to @zonker !‚Äù

• ‚ÄúOn the train back home from #osc09 was a great event, really nice to meet so many people from the #openSUSE community in person‚Äù

• ‚ÄúIn the train back to Stuttgart after 4 great days at the openSUSE conference. Great progress on all fronts. #osc09‚Ä≥

• ‚Äúgreat #osc09 event. I‚Äôve decided to give #openSUSE the whole disk on my laptop! And i want to contribute, contribute, contribute!‚Äù

We had overall around 225 persons from all over the world attending. For those who couldn’t make it to the conference we’ll try to publish all presentations and videos if available. A lot of people from Novell’s Nuernberg and Prague offices showed up -  sometimes only for a few hours – which shows that Nuernberg was the  right location for this event.  Novell VPs and Directors that showed up include Carlos Montero-Luque, Ralf Flaxa, Gerald Pfeifer and Roland Haidl.

The whole four days we had two tracks of talks and two tracks of ad-hoc conference sessions on a variety of topics incl. moblin, appliances, desktop, quality, community, toolchain and system, and legal. Some sessions to point out where:

• team meetings of GNOME and KDE developers, incl. a common meeting

• the governance sessions (see below)

• Keynotes by Lenz Grimmer on ‚Äúworking in a virtual community‚Äù and Gianugo Rabellino on ‚ÄúOpen Development in the trenches: a decade at the Apache Software Foundation‚Äù

• Stefan Werden announcing that he‚Äôs taking over the openSUSE retail Box business

Thursday evening we had a great party at the Novell offices and Friday and Saturday night a local cinema was presenting the “Creative Common Film night”.

We were impressed by the many discussions that formed and the ad-hoc conference sessions set up and the many groups gathered in the hall ways and pretty productively covered a certain topic. We’d like also point out a night time session on Friday night (until 3:30am) where more than 10 people triaged through GNOME bugs for openSUSE (incl. checking whether they are still valid) and hacked on GNOME features like Bacon (banshee UI for Moblin) and Zeitgeist (GNOME 3.0).

Governance
We had two sessions on how governance in the project does work today and what needs to be changed. Currently most of the decisions are done by experts in their area, the open question is what kind of process is needed in case area experts cannot make a decision. We have decided to move forward in the following way: A small group will now discuss this further together with the board, create a first proposal for public comments and once we have a good proposal, the openSUSE members will vote on this change.

RPM Summit
We had an RPM summit which Florian Festi (upstream RPM developer emplyoed by Red Hat) joined. Goal was to work on RPM itself to unify RPM usage between openSUSE and Fedora – the end goal is that a valid spec file for openSUSE or SLE is also valid for Fedora/Red Hat and vice versa.

Software Freedom
Saturday we had a track in German as part of the world wide Software Freedom day which was targeted to people new to Linux. We had pretty many interesting and supporting conversation with some participants that came just for this day. Most interesting to AJ was an incident at the rather big local farmer market in the morning where a person said “Today I go to Software Freedom day”. And AJ recognized this person later that day at the conference.

Journalists & Media

Ulrike Beringer made it happen that 11 journalists attended the conference and had several interviews at the conference with Joe Brockmeier, Michael Meeks and Andreas Jaeger.

Comment from our PR agency was: “The feedback of the journalists was very positive, as you can see in the report some of them even published several articles at once. Hence from our PR perspective the event was a big success!” RadioTux interviewed various participants for podcasts of more than 90 minutes.

Thanks to Ulrike for setting this up!

Photos
If you like to see some photos, check either of these two galleries:

• gallery.opensuse.org

• flickr osc09 group

Twitter
The flickr photos are also shown on the osc09 twitterwall that was created by gnokii.  #osc09 was the hashmark used for twittering about the conference.