oSC14 CfP and Registration Open!

Starting today, the oSC14 Program Committee is ready to accept your proposals for sessions!We’re also ready to register visitors interested in joining us. Your talk and workshop submissions should be fit in one of the four main tracks: end users, business, community and project, technology and development.

You can submit your abstracts in our conference submission tool. The submission period begins today, 29 January, and closes 28 February. Note that we will start accepting talks before the deadline. First acceptance emails will be sent 14th February, allowing you to start planning your trip already. And –of course– First come, first served! So, be in time!

The four tracks

The openSUSE conference traditionally has a theme. This year, the theme is: “The Strength to Change”.

Change has been a constant in Free Software. With the rise of mobile devices and the associated operating systems like Android and Chromebooks, we have to adopt as a project. We discussed strategy again on our mailing lists and by the time of the conference, we can hopefully all talk together and come to some conclusions. Change is never easy, but it is important!

Session proposals that connect in a meaningful way with change and strength would be appreciated!

End user track (Geeko Enthusiast): The user track provides the opportunity for the power users of any application to share their knowledge and share tricks they apply to get the most out of the applications they use. Know of a non-obvious but very useful feature, present it’s usage to fellow Geekos and users in this track. Topics include, but not limited to, applications, desktop environments, multimedia solutions and games.

Business track (Geeko for suits): The business track provides the opportunity for those that use openSUSE and/or FOSS in their business to describe the unique challenges they face. This includes, but not limited to, issues and solutions of interfacing with regulatory institutions, other business, staff training, and changing technology course.

Community and Project (Geekos around the world): Sessions in this area should focus on project and community activities, including, but not limited to, project governance, marketing, artwork and advocate reports. In many cases, this sessions bring a strong sense of unity to the project as a whole as we discuss some of the unique challenges that an Open Source Community confronts. If you have ideas that can help a community be stronger, join this track.

Technology & Development (Geeko tech): Sessions in this area should focus on system technology and distribution development. Including, but not limited to, software packaging, development/testing/debugging tools/practices/methods. Infrastructure software, deployment strategies and monitoring. These sessions will help a few of our members gain understanding of the many tools they can use when working in development for the distribution and other exciting projects.

Details

We will have four types of sessions:

• Short talk (30 min)

• Long Talk (60 min)

• Lightning Talk (15 min)

• Workshop (2 - 4 hours)

You can send in proposals until February 28 but the sooner the better as we will start accepting submissions on February 14.

Find our speaker guidelines here. This page also has tips on how to create smashing presentations and we ave some articles about organizing workshops and BoF sessions at this site.

Registration for oSC14

In other great news: registration has opened! That means you can now visit the conference site and register yourself for oSC14.