oSC14 Keynote Confirmed, More Awesome Coming

We are very pleased to announce Michael Meeks as our keynote speaker for the Saturday opening session at oSC14, held in Dubrovnik April 25th - 28th, 2014. Besides Michael Meeks, the openSUSE board will talk, opening the event on Friday and over 20 of the 60 currently submitted talks have already been accepted. Last but not least, we’d like to tell you that the deadline for the Call for Papers has been extended until the end of this month.

Deadline extended!

While Program Committee is putting the puzzle pieces together to create another great content packed conference we are happy to announce that the deadline for talk proposals has been extended to the end of March (March 31st). This will give those with great ideas that have not yet submitted their proposal the chance to do so over the next 3 weeks. We expect to have the final schedule available shortly after the March 31st close of the submission period.

If you have not yet submitted your talk proposal we encourage you to do so. The program committee will continue to accept proposals through out the extended submission deadline and if you wait until the end you may be out of luck as the schedule may be full.

What kind of proposals?

You’re wondering what kind of sessions we are looking for, and from whom? This year’s theme is “The Strength to Change“, as with all that’s going on in Free Software, change is a constant for us. Session proposals that connect in a meaningful way with change and strength would be appreciated!

As explained in the CfP announcement, we have four main themes this year:

• End user track (Geeko Enthusiast)

• Business track (Geeko for suits)

• Community and Project (Geekos around the world)

• Technology & Development (Geeko tech)

Sessions should fit in one of those, either as short (30 minutes) or long (60 minutes) talk, Lightning Talk (15 min) or workshop (2-4 hours). Find more details about what we’re looking for in the CfP announcement.

You can submit proposals on this page.

Michael Meeks Keynoting

Michael Meeks has been contributing to open source software for a long time, primarily focusing on GNOME, OpenOffice and now LibreOffice. Michael was one of the leaders in the formation of the Document Foundation and serves on the Engineering Steering Committee of the foundation. The Document Foundation’s primary purpose is to further the development of LibreOffice, the premiere open source office suite.

Since the fork of LibreOffice from the OpenOffice code base and the formation of the Document Foundation the LibreOffice code base has made great strides with the addition of many features and many bugs being fixed. This is in no small part attributable to Michael’s dedication and leadership. The countless improvements in LibreOffice have benefited Linux distributions by allowing us to offer a first grade office suite that is second to none as part of our effort.

In a recent transition Michael moved from SUSE to Collabora where Michael has the opportunity to continue to focus his attention on the development of LibreOffice and the exploration of new ideas for LibreOffice, such as a mobile version or a Cloud based version. Michael will gives us an overview on how the Document Foundation and LibreOffice were able to emerge from the corporate control of OpenOffice to become the great and vibrant community that has formed around the code base today. We will also here some anecdotes about dealing with such a large code base from a technical perspective.

We are very excited to have Michael speak at oSC14.

First talks accepted and scheduled!

The oSC14 Program Committee has already accepted over 20 of the 60 session proposals submitted to date. The event will be kicked off on Friday by the board, discussing the state of the openSUSE community in their opening keynote. Saturday, Michael Meeks will open the day.

In addition to the traditional Live Project Meeting, led by the openSUSE Board, we have a number of technically focused talks such as a presentation focused on Bcache that allows the combination of SSDs with spinning hard drives that provide higher capacities at a lower cost and a workshop for Ruby on Rails beginners. There are a number of confirmed talks about the technical infrastructure of openSUSE, from tools that help with packaging, to post build checks in OBS, and introduction to openSUSE initiated projects such as openQA.

The influence of the Cloud architecture on software development has not passed us either and thus we have a number of talks focusing on the Cloud topic. For those more interested in community activities that are less technical there will be the presentation of the new openSUSE Booth Box kit. The material included in a box is available for everyone to touch and see. There will also be a presentation about the location for oSC15 and a number of other talks relating to openSUSE marketing and promoting our project.

Come and join the fun!

written by Robert Schweikert, CfP committee