FUDCon, Day 2 and 3.

Sorry this comes late. I took a couple of days off after the Goodwill Tour o’ Doom to unwind with family and my blogging suffered as a result. FUDCon Day 2 was our BarCamp, which we organized the evening of Day 1. Day 3 was a continuation of some hackfests from Day 1, along with a couple additional sessions.

• One of the hallmarks of FUDCon is the BarCamp segment and this FUDCon definitely didn’t disappoint. We had a great variety of talks on Day 2, from Ambassador development and equipment, to a UI design clinic, to getting started hacking on wireless, to an array of system administration topics. It was a great variety and there was practically no way you could show up and not find something to appeal to you for most or all of the day.
• I didn’t see many talks myself, between working on organization, having one-on-one conversations with some of the attendees, and just helping Max make sure everything was ship-shape for the other folks there.
• I did get to hold a session based on my little PulseCaster app. Unfortunately there weren’t many attendees, but the upshot was that I got a private design clinic with Mairin Duffy. She helped me find some excellent ways to improve the interface for the next version, which I’ll probably work on later this weekend if I have time. I did get some interest from a couple of the podcasting folks who were around, including the Linux Outlaws, who now have a show available in which they interviewed me and Max.
• Max has already written some of the post mortem stuff we talked about at the event, so it’s worth checking out that post if you haven’t done so already.
• Sometimes you simply can’t please all the people all the time. We seem to get conflicting feedback at every event about how the next event should go, and those changes inevitably lead to many people asking for the event to be planned the way it went originally. While that can be frustrating from the organizers’ standpoint, it’s very important to us to keep those channels open and always try to be improving these events, while realizing that it’s impossible to have one perfect event for everyone.
• When traveling, always make sure you leave a venue with every personal item you carried in. ‘Nuff said.
• The photos from the event are incredible, especially the one that led to the FUDCon Berlin 2009 poster. Thank you to Nicu Buculei and many others who did such a wonderful job showing how much fun and friendship we have in the Fedora community. (Hmm, maybe the fifth foundation is actually “Fun”!)
• Day 3 was a little light, but one of the highlights was Chitlesh Goorah’s talk on the Fedora Electronics Lab, where a number of attendees gathered in the main hall to hear about the revolutionary inroads he’s been making with the EDA and manufacturing business community, showing off the wide expanse of open source tools available in Fedora.
• I think the best part of FUDCon for me was seeing and catching up in person with Max, with whom I talk fairly regularly but don’t get a chance to see often since he moved to Europe. Great job on FUDCon, my friend!

I flew home Monday (with another slightly-too-long layover in the hell of Heathrow) exhausted but very, very happy with the state of the European community and the excellent work being done by so many Fedorans there. Many thanks to Gerold Kassube, Joerg Simon, Fabian Affolter, Jens Kuehnel, Jeroen van Meeuwen, Christoph Wickert, Thomas Woerner, and so many others for making this a fantastic event. Also special thanks to the Red Hat security team, including Mark Cox, Josh Bressers, Murray McAllister, and many more, for making a roosting place at FUDCon, and also for making themselves available for our community to ask questions and discuss issues.

There was a lot of talk about where to hold the next FUDCon EMEA — I think most people agree that we should do somewhere other than Berlin, to spread the FUDCon joy around the continent, just as we are going to try to do with the North American FUDCon later this year by having it somewhere other than Boston. Wherever we hold it, I am certain we’ll be graced with some of the brightest, most energetic, and friendliest FOSS lovers from around the globe. Thanks to all of you, for making our community such an amazing place to work and play every day.