openSUSE Conference CfP deadline extended

Over the last month the conference team has received a large number of proposed sessions for the openSUSE conference. However, we also realize we have not entirely capitalized on the potential for especially the ‘interactive’ sessions we wanted. So we extend the deadline with two weeks to allow more BoF, Workshop and Hack sessions to be submitted. And we’ll release some more articles to explain what we want!

Interactive

As we wrote in the initial call for papers, it is our ambition to make the openSUSE conference about community and getting things done. Two-way communication, not one-way! Interactivity, creativity, fun. The awesome Zentrifuge location is there to inspire us and we choose the subtitle of rwx³, commonly known as the UNIX acronym for “Read, Write, Execute” for our conference.

More importantly, we asked for ‘interactive session proposals’. And that is also where we failed a bit. Not everyone in openSUSE is familiar with workshops, BoFs or Hack sessions. We introduced the BoF in an article but the other sessions have not seen any explanation besides what can be found on the speaker guideline page.

So more time and explanation

In short, the four sessions explained:

• BoF - “Birds of a Feather”. Basically means ‘members of a team”. Can be best described as an informal team meeting to discuss a variety of things and make decisons. (article desribing the BoF)

• Workshop - teaching session. In a workshop, a number of participants sit down to learn in a hands-on manner (via exercises) a particular skill like packaging or testing an application and submitting a bugreport.

• Hack Session - coding session. A group of developers/packagers/artist/writers/etc gets together to get a particular job done. For example to get certain packages build, a feature integrated or a document written.

In the coming two weeks we will release articles on giving a workshop and leading a hack session. We hope that this will inspire you all to come up with good ideas and help you organize, plan and send in a session for the openSUSE conference!

Watch this space for the write-ups on workshops and hack sessions and read this article about the BoF to find out how to best organize a team meeting!

Send in your proposals

Once you’ve identified what you’d like to do at the conference, send in a proposal. Don’t worry about your skills and if you’re good enough, nor about if you can finance the trip. If you WANT to do it, that’s enough! We’ll provide support at the conference in leading the sessions and we also will have travel sponsorship available for those tight on mony, watch this space for news on that soon.

Helping out

On a sidenote, the conference team is still looking for help! If you want to get involved and help us make the openSUSE conference possible, please subscribe to the team mailinglist: opensuse-conference@opensuse.org and checkout the planning page.