FOSDEM 2008, It's Over...

I’m still a little bit groggy after FOSDEM, but so far i’m quite happy. Nothing really bad happened, it seems that everybody got back alive. :-)

I will for sure forget something to list, but let me start.

• Talks

  • First day was a little bit slow, the devroom was not that crowded compared with the 2nd day.

  • Second day was in a smaller room, we changed with the Mozilla team, they needed a bigger room. Especially the laptop talks were quite crowded - so next year we will have only laptop talks. :-)

  • Somebody made a picure of the chalkboard saying “openSAUNA”? It was very hot and filled with used air.

  • Very interesting community talks from the Jordis, nice to meet you guys, and Benjamin.

  • We recorded all talks, you will find them with the slides on the openSUSE wiki, keep in mind that Jürgen and Tom need some time for cutting/encoding.

• Booth

  • The setup was good, we had 2 demo systems, mainly showing KDE4 and GNOME on the other system. Both with big monitors and decent hardware. We also showed Alpha2 in Virtualbox, since many people wanted to see the new installation workflow. We had power and ethernet directly at the booth this time! (Murphys Law: you only need long cables if you don’t have them with you)

  • We spread 1080 PromoDVDs!

  • On the first day we had more visitors at the booth, i feared that we would run out of DVDs very fast. Second day was slower, so vice versa compared to the talks. I brought back 4 PromoDVDs, so it fitted perfectly :-)

  • A lot of interesting communication at the booth.

  • Staffing was imho better than last year, let me thank especially Adrian and Frank for the support. Francis and Andrew helped a lot, and “Mr. Showman” Michael Meeks :-)

  • Unfortunately i found out too late that live.yahoo.com works very nice with openSUSE and a webcam. Be prepared that from now on you will have a live stream from every event where i am.

  • We didn’t have the nice counters from last year, they are too big to get them into one car. :-(

  • We didn’t clean up the booth proper before leaving. A big apologize to the FOSDEM team!

• Organization

  • Most of our organization went smooth, no big problems.

  • Zonker was at FOSDEM for the first time, prepare to see him more often in the future!

  • The FOSDEM orga was very good, thanks to the whole FOSDEM team and again Pascal!

  • Wlan was good this year. Sure, sometimes it was a little bit slow, but it worked!

  • I still suck at providing drinks for the booth/presentation room, sorry for that.

If you want to see some pictures, so far there is nothing on gallery.opensuse.org, check out the collection Carlos made.

Overall it was a great weekend, a lot of fun (and that’s what it is about .. or?), and it showed again that FOSDEM is one of the most important events in Europe. If you have suggestions how to make it better, feel free to send them to the project mailing list. Thanks to everybody who helped/made a talk/supported us! If i didn’t named you above, it’s quite likely that i just need some sleep … See you next year!