… or, “Making Event Attendance Count”

Late last year, I gave a keynote at paired Finnish conferences MindTrek and OpenMind. While the events were well worth attending, afterwards I spent a few bleak hours thinking about the actual costs of my attendance. If I had left Canada just for these events (which, thankfully, I didn’t) then a naive estimation of costs would have been something like this:

• ~20 000 km of air travel (Vancouver to Frankfurt, Frankfurt to Helsinki. Return.)
• ~7 000+ CAD of costs (flights, hotels, taxis, meals, time) (borne by a combination of eZ Systems, the Mozilla Foundation and the …

I’ll be attending the Openmind conference from October 2nd to 3rd and will be giving a keynote at the event.

Openmind is being organized by COSS, an interesting Finnish Free Software and Open Source development agency that helps Finnish and Scandinavian businesses and projects use and develop FLOSS.

Other keynote presenters at the event (that readers of this blog may know) include Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of the Linux Foundation, Aleksander Farstad, CEO of eZ Systems AS and FLOSS researcher Rishab Aiyer Gosh.

I also hoping that since Monty is in the area, he will also be able to attend.

…

I just received word that my proposal (which was to present my Age of Literate Machines presentation) for FrOSCon has been accepted.

I’m pretty excited - the event should be fun and it will give me a good chance to see friends (including a good number of my German MySQL colleagues)

My friends Theo Schlossnagle, Laura Thomson and Chris Shiflett are each presenting at ApacheCon Europe. They are each excellent presenters with solid content - I have seen Theo present at a previous ApacheCon, caught Laura at several OSCONs and finally saw Shiflett speak at the PHP Quebec conference earlier this year.

The deal is simple - sign up for any of their tutorials before the early bird deadline for the conference closes (on June 6th) and get complementary copies of some of the speaker’s book(s).

The sessions are:

• Advanced Production Troubleshooting …

Techworld.com reports:

The European Commission this week appeared to take a step back from its earlier position on the patentability of software, stating that computer programs are not patentable, and that patents on them may be struck down by the courts.

For the full story, see:
http://www.techworld.com/applications/news/index.cfm?newsid=6081

The 3rd international conference on GPL v3 will take place in Barcelona, Spain on June 22nd and 23rd. The international GPLv3 conferences are part of a year-long public consultation process to update the GNU General Public License.

Speakers include Richard Stallman, Eben Moglen, chairman at Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) and Georg Greve, President of Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE). Expert panelists from all parts of Europe, and from around the world will lead discussions on licence internationalisation, DRM, software patents, and adoption of the finished licence.

The current draft of the GPLv3 and resources explaining the background to the update are availble at http://gplv3.fsf.org/

The Conference’s schedule and further information will be published soon at
…

At the 2004 Foo Camp, Danese Cooper, a few other FLOSS advocates (forgive me, Foo Camp is a blur and I don’t remember who you were) and myself gave an ad hoc session on the methods and strategies that we each used to advocate FLOSS and to help people working closed environments become more open.

The session was a blast (and well-received), so much so that Danese and I proposed the session for last year’s OSCON. We didn’t make the cut, but I still tried again for this year’s EuroOSCON and, this time, the session was accepted.

The session should be fun to present, but a bit of a bear to write. I have only 45 minutes to try to fit in the most …

The PHP Vikinger is a community-driven PHP event that will be held in Skien, Norway from June 24th to 25th. Like the famous Foo Camp and Bar Camp, PHP Vikinger is driven by its attendees. The people who come choose and present the sessions at the event.

Attendance is by a mix of invitation and registration. 50 invitations have been sent to various PEAR and PHP contributors and 50 spots are open for people who register. Additionally, the invitees have been asked to nominate another 50 people who should be invited to the event.

The event is meant to be as affordable as possible; registration is only 20 Euros, and simple food and a place to sleep are …

I just sent out the invitations for the PHP Vikinger event. My method for choosing who to invite was pretty simple - I chose people listed in the the PHP and PEAR credits who I had written personal email to in the last few years.

Nepotistic? “Nay”, say I, “Nepotastic!” I know that the people I invited are cool, which will mean a good event for people who register. Also, as we have registrations, it won’t be too elitist or exclusive.

If you are curious, read on for the entire invitation (minus the list of attendees.)

NOTE: If you didn’t get an invitation email, then hold tight - you will still be able to register in a week or so.

Aloha $person,

This is an invitation to the PHP Vikinger - read on for details.

WHAT IS IT?
“”"”"”"”"”"
The PHP Vikinger is a community-driven PHP event that will be …

Sebastian Bergmann writes:

FrOSCon is a two-day conference on free software and open source, which takes place on 24th and 25th June 2006 at the University of Applied Sciences Bonn-Rhein-Sieg, in St. Augustin near Bonn, Germany.

Focus of the conference is a comprehensive range of talks about current topics in free software and open source. Furthermore, space will be provided for developers of free software and open source projects to organize their own developer meetings or even their own program.

FrOSCon is organized for the first time in 2006 by the department of computer science in collaboration with the Linux/Unix User Group Sankt Augustin, the student body and the FrOSCon e.V., and aims to establish itself as the largest event of its kind in Rhineland.

Projects

Successful …