As I write this, my friend (and eLiberatica chair) Lucian is packing up to fly to Bucharest for this year’s instance of the eLiberatica Electronic Frontier/Free Software/Open Source conference. Sadly, I won’t be participating this year – a commitment to less travel and a new venture make doubly sure that I’m staying home.

Despite the downturn, it looks like this is going to be a great year for the conference: 400 people have registered and the list of speakers is formidable, including: OSI board member Danese Cooper, FSFE founder Georg Greve, MySQL founders David Axmark and Monty Widenius and Zbigniew “Gandalf” Branecki from Mozilla Europe.

If you are in or near Romania, you should try to …

Last week, I wrote about an experimental video program that I am coordinating for Mozilla.

I’ve now posted a more complete overview of the program, along with a draft guide for the program testers and an early FAQ on the program.

Helping us in our early stages are the following good and brave souls:

• Alina Mierlus, Free Software/Open Source advocate and a driver of Mozilla.ro
• …

I am a conference junkie. I love attending them, organizing them, speaking at them, planning to attend them, seeing my friends at conferences, making friends with the nice (but often stressed) people who run conferences and so on. I even like eating the (often bad) food - kvetching about it builds a sense of camaraderie with the other participants.

Given how much time and money I spend on conferences already, it might be hard for you to be able to get more money directly out of me. However, here is one small tip on a way that you might be able to do this.

When you send me email about upcoming events, send me links to useful feed as well. Many of you are technologists who run technology conferences for other technologists. For Zarquon’s sake, use the common pieces of technology that many of us use.

What would such feeds look like? Well, to answer my own rhetorical question …
…

For the curious, the slides for the eLiberatica 2007 presentations are now up at http://eliberatica.ro/2007/ - the slides include presentations from eZ CEO Aleksander Farstad, Brian Behlendorf, FSF Europe President Georg Greve, Ubuntist Kurt von Finck and MySQL co-founder Monty Widenius (and yours truly, but the slides are a bit weak - check out my …