Just want to share some of the experiences that I had at SCALEx8 in Los Angeles. The event was a great opportunity to network and to meet the local community in south california including people from other parts of the US and abroad. I had the chance to chat with interesting FLOSS people like distro specific people from SuSE, Debian, Gentoo, Ubuntu and Fedora. Same thing I got the chance to also reach to developers and FLOSS personalities like Randal from FLOSS Weekly, Shawn Power from Linux Journal and Larry Bushey from Going Linux.
At the same time I also was motivated to engage in more specific talks with people from the education industry given that I was wearing my OOo4Kids hat and I was looking to network with other educational organizations including Revolution Linux and education specific distro like Qimo. Other contacts that I already hold a connection include Michael Dexter from LinuxFund.org and Ryan Singer from IntMarketing which I also happened to shared a back story with the organization of the first waves of ODF communities, including ODF Fellowship, Friends of OpenDocument and OpenDocument Foundation.
In the aftermath of the Oracle acquisition there were plenty of now ex Sun employees and some important speakers that had also some strong opinions about the now defunct Sun and also the way they manage FLOSS projects. There were many conversations about the big holes and bureaucracy that Sun had and how they might have been the sole responsible for having a very bad openness policy.
There were also some talks about ODFKit and how we can resume some of the efforts for having more ODF tools available, for governments and organizations to deploy. This with the promise of having next year a more strong ODF and OOo presence in the event. I think that these conversations where worth it to have a more critical view of OOo role in the US and the start of an OOo Regicon in the US.
The event also had a great deal of interesting ideas for a conference, with a “Try it” room, a Job Fair for FLOSS people, Women in FLOSS day, a Hardware day and many other specific workshops that tackle the different priorities from different parts of the communities. I did had a major presence on some of the talks including the MeeGo talk where an Intel representative got bombarded by questions about the Moblin interface vs the Maemo interface, the adoption for open standards like OGG Theora. A very basic but also interesting conference on KDE 4 for noobs which end up being more like intermediate users.
Food wasn’t that great, I most say, however I really like the blueberry pie I got to eat on Sunday, I even got 2 slices, a real treat.
Enjoying some blueberry pie
On my first day I enjoyed the company of many web people hanging out with
Status.net, the company seems like a cool bunch of individuals and definitely had great fun meeting them. The conversations about Google Buzz, Google Wave, Twitter, Friendfeed and the role of Identi.ca and open formats like FOAF and finding a way to use it. As well as delivering more intersting things like URL recognition whenever is either media or images right on the post.
And yeah finally there was my talk, the format was very constrained to time and I most confess I was feeling unprepared for the timing of my talk and suffer a bit at the beginning. Then I took control and was able to give a great presentation. Later that day many people would congratulate me and ask me for more information about OOo4Kids. I was fortunate to get the help from Ryan to get my session recorded, check it out here.
Tags: education, odf, OOo4Kids, OpenOffice.org, SCALE, USA
Now that twitter is going mainstream new rappers have started to appear. It started with the DJs but more and more the Wu associates are starting to come on twitter and seems that the fanbase and the lists have started to raise about the twitter bird. So far I was able to add myself to a bunch of emcees from wu and affiliates including:
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