openSUSE Conference: an interview with Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier

No, it was actually better. The goal was 200 people, with a good mix between Novell employees and community contributors. We actually did better than 200, I think between 215 and 230 people -- I haven't gotten the final number yet, as I had to leave on Sunday.

And the actual participation was fabulous. People were great at being self-starting and setting up their own sessions and generally making things happen once they were there. We had a great conference, and I think most people were very happy having attended. The only consistent complaint, which was expected and unavoidable, was that there was no open network for participants except for a bunch of wired connections in the front room for people to get email, etc., and for presenters to use.

The facility simply wasn't geared to handle our kind of bandwidth needs, so we decided no network was better than a crappy one -- plus, we did want people to actually talk to one another. Some people have actually suggested having no network next time as well.

It was mostly a Q&A session -- I wanted to get people together who were interested in the ambassadors program and find out what questions they had, what they might need, and how to go forward faster. It's really something that we want the community to define -- budgetwise, there are some parameters being set by what we have to work with, but other than that, this is something that I largely want to let the people doing the work to define and take ownership of - and that's going well so far.

Very successful, I think -- people had enough structure to have some idea what to expect when they showed up, and then also enough freedom to plan their own activities. I hate going to conferences where you have no slack time and no way to talk to other people with similar interests without just skipping out entirely or staying extra days. So this gave people room to be part of a "general" conference while still addressing their specific areas of interest. The GNOME team, for instance, headed back to the SUSE office to do a bunch of bug triage, which was awesome.

In general, I would like to do more pre-planning next time, more to get upstreams involved, but overall I think this went very well.

Due to the network issue, of course, we weren't able to be inclusive for people who couldn't attend physically, and that was disappointing.

I didn't but I was told by the participants that it was successful and they were able to make some progress. Really, I think the primary thing was to get several people from different projects in a room together to get things started, and I think we've accomplished that. I really want to thank Florian Festi for coming and the Fedora/Red Hat guys for being very receptive to working together here.

I think the openSUSE governance sessions we had were very useful. We got a lot of ground covered and had some very good conversations with all the right stakeholders (or almost, anyway) in the room. Of course as with any event we had a few key people who couldn't attend for various reasons, I'd say we had the majority of people at the conference who needed to be there.

In general, I wasn't attending many talks myself -- I was mostly in unconference sessions or taking the opportunity to meet face to face with my colleagues and openSUSE contributors that I don't often get to see personally.

We're looking at co-locating with BrainShare Europe next year. There's a lot of overhead with planning a conference, facility-wise, so if we can do away with some of that by co-locating the event, I think that's a good way to go. We need to find out where BSE will be held, though.

Just that the event was quite well-attended and fairly successful. We accomplished quite a bit in four days and it was really useful just getting people together. We needed to have an opportunity for contributors to meet one another and really bond, and I think that happened. We were certainly quite efficient at beer consumption during the Thursday party... ;-)