August 28, 2009, 6:00 am
The openSUSE Conference is coming together nicely! We announced the second keynote for the conference yesterday, and I’m pretty excited about the choice: Gianugo Rabellino of the Apache Foundation will be doing the closing keynote on Sunday, September 20th.
The Apache Foundation is celebrating its 10th year this year (that’s 10 years of the Apache Foundation, the Apache HTTP server itself has been around much longer) and Rabellino will be giving us a look “behind the scenes” at the Apache Foundation. I’ve never had the privilege of hearing Rabellino speak, but I have a feeling it’s going to be a fine and fun presentation.
Our opening keynote is Google’s Leslie Hawthorn. I have had the pleasure to see Leslie speak, and she’s outstanding. Having known Leslie for many years, I can also say she’s a really nice person in general, and truly knows her stuff when it comes to working with FOSS communities.
And, of course, we have a bunch of great talks throughout the conference. That’s not even the best part, though! The conference will also have plenty of time for ad-hoc sessions and working sessions. Meaning that attendees have the opportunity to create a large chunk of the agenda on-the-fly and to suit their interests. While the presentations are valuable, the most important component of the conference is that we’ll have a fair percentage of the openSUSE contributor community together in one place.
There’s ample opportunity for contributors to talk online, but it doesn’t compare to face-to-face conversations. I’m of the firm belief you can get more done in a few hours in person than you can get done in a few days of emails, phone calls, and instant messaging. And, despite my repeated requests, nobody has developed a reliable beer over TCP/IP transport system. Not even an alpha!
Counting down the days now — just a few short weeks, can’t wait to see the openSUSE crew live and in person!
