After this morning’s activities, I spent a little time catching up on emergency email and did a bit of polishing of my slides for my talk later today. At some point I realized my head felt like it was going to explode, which seemed incredibly unfair given the fact that I had maybe a pint and a half at dinner the night before. So Clint and I went to the cafeteria, since he was similarly afflicted, and found some Tylenol, which helped immensely. Over the course of the day, I also played several ultimately unsuccessful rounds of phone tag with people regarding FUDCon matters.
I gave my talk on the Fedora/Red Hat relationship and our open source strategic technology betting which was very well attended and well received as well. I got great questions from the audience — which I always like, because it means people are not just listening but also thinking — and had some interesting discussions afterward as well. Very much worth being here!
I spent a while talking to someone who runs a business incubation program here at the SLCC, along with Christer Edwards, and learning about the challenges he’s up against in providing services for those customers. I had some “Aha!” moments that I should be able to turn into action items when I meet up with the Community Architecture team in Raleigh next week.
Then I went upstairs again for Ian Weller’s talk on measuring community statistics. It also was very well attended and, though relatively brief, there were many insightful questions (and answers) so I know again there is a very rapt audience out there for the work Ian, Michael DeHaan, and others are doing on EKG and other community statistical tools.
I spent the next hour working on some personal projects, went back downstairs to the hall and had some more conversations with people around the hall from XMission and Novell about open source education, and then headed back upstairs for a session on open source podcasting, where I’m writing this post. This has been my one subpar experience at the conference, since I’m pretty disappointed the speaker has spent most of his time talking about non-open source solutions. It would be nice to see some movement around this need. Maybe I can recruit some people to help me fill it!
Tonight we’ll have the Geek Dinner at a place called Spaghetti Mama’s, which I”m looking forward to now that I didn’t eat anything since breakfast. Then I’ll probably head back to the hotel and try and do a smidge of catch-up before I crash. Overall, another superb day at UTOSC 2009!