26 Aug 2009

FrOSCon 2009: Quick Review

Submitted by blizzz

As you know, I was at the FrOSCon last week, in first line to keep our Kubuntu booth up and running. On the outward bound i met Eckhart from KDE by chance, which made it quite entertaining.

The first day started with waiting for our booth material, which had some delay, so that it was made out of my Laptop and few CDs I got from ShipIt (all in all we had about 30 to 35 of them only) for about an hour (which was not so bad, however).

In my opinion, there were less visitors at the booth than last year, but maybe that was caused because the location was not at the main pass this time. Anyway, there were lots of interested visitors, many of them Kubuntu users already. So we gave lot of support, advice and had nice chats, also with people from other distributions. I'd say the FrOSCon was a success in "consumer retention", and also all CDs have been given away.

As this is a conference, there were many interesting talks, and some of them i could visit ;) There was "Unit-Testing Bad-Practices by Example" on the PHP-track by Benjamin Eberlei which was quite informative, but not the killer talk.

More exciting was Dries Buytaert's keynote "The Secrets of Building and Participating in Open Source Communities", where he presented his experience and dealing with the Drupal community. He gave a lot of insights and stated his "secrets", I need to recapitulate his slides when they are made available. Alexandra confirmed his statements in general, so there is some expertise behind it :)

Eventually i attented another PHP talk, introducing XDebug. This is far more comfortable than studying some docs :D

Well, then there was the Social Event and Socializing itself. While the event was not sponsored in the way it was in the years before, it seemed to be shorter and Sven and I managed with wine from the local supermarked. The good thing, on the other side, was that all people where fresh and fit next morning.

All in all I am satisfied with FrOSCon in all single aspects and I look forward for the next year.

P.S.: Finally a tip: giving presentations with the WiiMote. Rocking Stuff!

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