openSUSE:LCA2011
openSUSE @ XYZ Event
The openSUSE Project had a community booth at LCA
LCA2011event report edit
- LCA 2011 happened from mon 24 to sat 29 of Januari 2011.
- Location: Brisbane, Australia
- openSUSE Ambassadors: Jos Poortvliet, Tim Serong
- Event Details
- It is a well organized and quite professional conference. Biggest sponsors HP, IBM, Intel and Google. Budget about $700.000, entry fee from $60 to $600 (depending if you're student, hobbyist or professional and if you get early bird registration (50% off). There are about 1000 people there, mostly semi-regulars, few students. Most of them quite technical and experienced.
- Arrived Tuesday night, Wednesday first day of the conference for me but the conf starts on Monday with small sessions.
- results
- At professional networking meeting got to talk to a few people, got one in contact with Bretzn team to talk about payment systems for openSUSE's appstore and someone else on OBS.
- Attended talks, among others by Red Hat/Fedora ppl Learned about Koji and how it is about 5 lightyears behind on OBS :D
- Got in contact with a few local (open)SUSE people, will try to help them to set up more of a community in AU.
- Realized many people want to spread openSUSE but don't know how. They used to have local Novell contacts but those disappeared (layoffs, personnel changes) and now they're lost. I will try and get them motivated to become openSUSE ambassador. Need to expand our ambassador program, communicate it better and work with the local Novell/SUSE offices, integrate their work with local (open)SUSE people and the ambassador work! This is what Red Hat and Canonical do better.
- Spoke with keynote speaker Mark Pesce, will try to get him as keynote speaker for Desktop Summit (if not maybe suse conf!)
- Had a meeting with Fedora Project Lead. We discussed cross-distro collaboration. There will be a discussion panel on that on FOSDEM lead by him and the Debian project lead, I will join them.
- Communication
- Novell/SUSE was 'fairy penguin' sponsor (A$ 1500). This was noticed by a few people.
- Blogged daily about LCA & other stuff (blog aggregated on an LCA planet) and tweeted several times. Also linked with Facebook.
- Gave a 90 second lightning talk (24 slides about SUSE Studio) during the closing ceremony which earned me a t-shirt (winner best lightning talk). Resulted in ppl coming up to the booth all Saturday to say they would check out openSUSE and SUSE Studio (again)
- Held a booth on Saturday together with Tim, local Novell/SUSE employee and openSUSE volunteer. Answered many questions.
- Created 1 A4 poster with the marketing team to get geeks' interest, gave away about 40 and used it in booth area
- Gave away 150 DVD's, rest is with 2 local openSUSE ppl now.
- Conclusion
- This conference is certainly worth going to but needs more marketing materials and more people, a team!
Common Questions Asked edit
- openSUSE still alive? (answer: more than ever :D)
- Why would I use openSUSE and not XXXX? (because we're cool, see A4 poster)
- How is the takeover stuff doing for openSUSE? (see my interview with Jeff Hawn)
LCA2011 Resources edit
Upload your presentations here
- Presentation SUSE Studio 90 sec lightning talk
- Recorded Talk - lighting talk can be found on https://conf.linux.org.au/wiki/Videos
- my photo's can be found on picasaweb
Event pics