… 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 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 …
…

This weekend, Monty and I got together for a different kind of hacking session.

Instead of developing software, we were working on developing a set of rough principles and rules for running a Free Software/Open Source business. We both have a good amount of experience working with various FLOSS projects (like Mozilla, MySQL, PHP, etc.) and FLOSS companies (like eZ Systems, Mozilla, MySQL, Zend, etc.) and hope that we can put this experience to good use.

For me, this was a tremendous help - I’ve been putting off working on this for Foo Associates for some months now. It is much easier to work on meeting the needs of customers than it is to work on planning for the future.

The notes are still extremely rough, but both Monty and I want to post them so that people can discuss. Also, …

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)

I’ve just posted slides and (rather) rough presenter notes and image credits for my Age of Literate Machines presentation.

These are still draft slides. I’ll be working on an improved version in the coming weeks and months.

Many thanks to all who have sat through drafts of the talk (DES, Jen, Hilde, Markus, Monty, Rory, Tony).

• The Age of Literate Machines - Rough speaker?s notes and image credits (PDF)
• The Age of Literate …

Summary

A good week - we made progress on the Internet as Public Good Symposium, which is the major task on my Mozilla plate right now. However, an unexpected event at another client meant that my Friday was a bit messed up. Will work on reviewing bugs and other missed responsibilities over the weekend.

Activities

• Worked with Berkman and Harvard Business School teams to help plan and present the Internet as Public Good Symposium.
  • Event wiki now online, but still private. - started putting in content. Will make public after panel participants have a chance to review.
  • Conf. call with available IPG team members to sort out logistics, invitations and distribute tasks.
  • Set up database to store info on who’s invited, who’s coming and so on.
• Minor bits of work helping Mozilla Corp. team plan their OSCON presence …

At last month’s Vancouver PHP Conference, local journalist Bruce Byfield gave me a quick interview about how I got involved in Free Software and Open Source. We chatted for a while about my time at MySQL, my bits of work in the PHP community and what I am currently up to. The interview turned into a profile for Linux.com that was published a few days ago.

I was a bit surprised to find that there have been a few anonymous trolls for the profile - I didn’t think that there would be any comments on the profile.

The Linux.com profile: …

I wonder how many people will attend a session at a tech conference where the start of the description reads as follows:

Hey You! Yes, You! Manager, marketeer, sales professional: are you tired of 98lb weaklings kicking silicon in your face?

I am thinking this way because my friends at MySQL AB are putting on another MySQL User Conference - this time from April 23 - 26 in Santa Clara, California.

The Call for Participation went live a few days ago and, as always, I am proposing a session. I don’t really need to go, but I definitely have a soft spot for the event, as I chaired the first two MySQL UCs. Also, I had a good deal of fun working on the …

Ilan Rabinovitch let me know that the SCALE team is getting started on version 5x of the SoCal Linux Expo.

In past years, SCALE has been a great community event - the ratio of promoters to real Linux enthusiasts is low and the attendees are friendly. Also, like most other Linux conferences, attendees have a strong interest in many other FLOSS community issues and technologies, like BSD, Firefox, Apache, PHP, MySQL, Free Software licensing and so on. Hopefully I can attend this year (and can wear both my eZ hat and my Mozilla hat for the event).

The event will happen from February 10-11 and will be held at the Westin Los Angeles Airport hotel.

Get more details at: …

Some years ago (as penance for working at MySQL during some temporary corporate brain-damage about Free Software licensing) I began volunteering at the Free Software Foundation.

For the most part, I have spent my time providing support on Free Software licensing questions for the FSF Compliance Lab and helping out on the GPL v3 effort.

While both activities are quite rewarding, the work at the compliance lab tends to be most interesting. We serve a wide variety of people and organizations who have a correspondingly wide range of experience, views and questions. This leads to rewarding experiences, as well as experiences that are more …