Sorry I’ve been away from the blog for a bit. Open Source Bridge was totally hectic and I failed to get a report out in time. I’ll try to remedy that later this week with a summary of what happened there, because it really was a great conference for practitioners in open source, and very different from the equally successful Southeast Linux Fest which I attended the weekend before.
But on to the present — I’m here in Berlin and tomorrow LinuxTag begins, bringing with it thousands of free software fans, advocates, developers, and contributors. Max has already written about the magnificent booth being set up by Fedora Ambassadors for the festivities, and I plan to be there as much as possible myself. From what I understand, some space was made in our booth schedule where a willing volunteer could help out — this is me raising my hand! ?
On Friday we start the big FUDCon event which should be fantastic. There will be a huge assemblage of Fedora contributors, mostly from the EU but from a few other places as well. I am very much looking forward to hearing the talks, and reporting on the many cool hackfests that will happen at this event. I believe we will have session tracks in both German and English and I hope many of the LinuxTag visitors will attend to assuage their curiosity about how the Fedora community works, and how our work might be important or compelling to them as FOSS participants.
Today, Jesse Keating and I fought off our jet lag by exercising — essentially walking as much of Berlin as we could manage before our feet cried for mercy. Before the day was up we visited Potsdamer Platz, Checkpoint Charlie, the Holocaust Memorial, and the Brandenburger Tor, among others. Thanks to my failed sense of direction, we missed out on seeing the Schloss Charlottenburg, a beautiful palace designed after that at Versailles, but thanks to all the other cool stuff we saw I think he forgave me. ? Lest anyone thinnk we just goofed off all day, when we got back to the hotel I caught up on a bunch of email; had a three-hour meeting with Max, Gerold, Fabian, and Jeroen; had another hour or so meeting with Max; and proceeded to work on even more email and other tasks for the next several hours, on top of this post.
Yikes! Conferences are busy. But they are absolutely fantastic because I get to catch up with good friends from around the globe who are doing awesome work as contributors in Fedora and to free software in general. You guys are inspiring and I look forward to seeing you at LinuxTag and FUDCon, and having a beverage with you at the FUDPub event.