All three of us joined 1000+ people at the Ohio LinuxFest on Saturday (October 11). Ken and I first came in 2006, all three of us last year, and again this year.

Keynotes: Community

The entire day was bookended by the Community Managers for two major distributions. Could we ask for a better setup?

Joe Brockmeier, AKA “Zonker”, delivered the morning keynote, entitled “Bootstrapping Community”. He is the openSUSE Community Manager. Novell has been doing great work for open-source software in the pasts few years, so his role at Novell is certainly interesting to us. He discussed his role in promoting and building community around openSUSE, and it seems like he is doing a good job of changing what has been a lackluster community into something vibrant.

Jono Bacon delivered the evening keynote, entitled “Building Belonging”. As Ubuntu users who love our community, we were quite excited to hear what Jono had to say. It turned out to be quite inspiring, as he brought up the idea of community as a sense of belonging, about each of our stories and how they give meaning to who we are, and how everyone’s contributions are gifts to a community. Look for us to unpack some of that in upcoming posts, but it was very motivating. (He also asked how many people use Ubuntu and took a picture. Wow!)

Presentations

Throughout the day there were various presentations on all topics. Some presentations were geared to Linux beginners or those switching from Windows: Andrew Pitonyak discussed open-source software that was equivalent (or superior to) Windows software; Elizabeth Garbee, a well-spoken teenager, discussed how she has grown up with Linux at home and in school.

Other presentations delved specific topics: Daniel Chen, AKA “crimsun”, explored the confusing world of Linux audio systems and subsystems; Roland Hess showcased Blender and the way the Blender project has been successful in fundraising; Mackenzie Morgan discussed precautions about open WiFi networks (which was the same time as the Ubuntu BoF so we missed it, but she put her slides up).

Still other presentations discussed some interesting applications of open-source software: Mat Kovach returned this year for another presentation about using various open-source tools to track baseball statistics; Scott Preston discussed specific ways to build robots using Linux.

Unfortunately, the presentations ran in parallel, and it was hard to decide between three concurrent presentations, but it was nice to see so many interesting topics being discussed.

Vendors

There were two vendor exhibits where companies and organizations could set up booths. There were good showings by Ubuntu (run by the Ohio LoCo), Fedora, and openSUSE. The Linux Fund had a table; they are an organization set up to offer credit cards whose “rewards” are donated to various OSS projects.

HP had a booth showcasing some mini laptops and a neat OSS project called Fossology: Bob Gobeille described the project with the goal of straightening out any inconistencies in open source projects’ licenses, clauses specific to a project, or ways they could make their license situation clearer for contributors and users of their software. It seems like a really neat project that is filling an important, if not thankless, role.

Ubuntu BoF

We missed one of the afternoon sessions because we attended the Ubuntu BoF (Birds of a Feather), an ad hoc, informal discussion about Ubuntu. In this one, rockstars Richard Johnson “nixternal”, Jorge Castro, and Jono led discussion about contributing to Ubuntu—helping with bugs, documentation, becoming a MOTU, ways of joining the community. It was apparent both that there are a bunch of passionate people and that there are as many who want to jump in.

Overall it was a worthwhile trip for us. We are very grateful to be a part of the Ubuntu/Linux/FOSS community and look forward to more of these events! Get connected with your LoCo or find a local LUG to find out about events in your area!