I went to Limerick this week-end to attend the SkyNet/Ubuntu
talks.
It was good fun, I enjoy so much walking around UL campus and corridors,
basking in old memories of when I was just settling in Ireland and was
learning so much, all the time :)
The first talk was mostly about selling up Microsoft cloud services,
which felt a bit surreal for a mostly open-source audience. I suspect
the organisers didn't highlight enough that this particular afternoon of
talks was slanted toward Ubuntu and open-source in general, so we
definitely weren't the best audience. It's very strange to hear that the
cost of computing is coming down at last, then being told that no, it's
impractical for businesses to try to switch to free alternatives like
OpenOffice, while at the same time mentioning that there won't be any
more compatibility issues between .doc and .docx since Microsoft is
dropping support for Office 2003 and businesses are forced to upgrade to
Office 2007. How does this match the necessity for companies to look at
ways to reduce costs, or not being willing to look at compatible
alternatives (since they already managed compatibility issues for
.doc/.docx issues)?
The second talk was about Google Summer of Code, by the very dynamic
Jimmy O'Regan. He insisted a lot on the importance and impact that
having a designated mentor has on a new contributor. I'm struggling
myself to get involved with open-source communities at the moment (as
opposed to projects in themselves), so that's something that's very
interesting to think about, and see if perhaps it could be adapted in a
scalable way to lower the barrier to involvement for new contributors
outside of GSoC.
Right before the lunch break, the folks from
Tog had a talk on setting up your own
hackerspace. I'm not sure at all we've ironed out all the issues with
our own space in Dublin, but it'd certainly be very cool for other
cities around Ireland to set up their own so we can all learn from each
other's experience, within the Irish culture. I didn't know about the
Hackerspaces design
patterns, I definitely
have some reading to do on that. The main point to take away from the
talk IMO: "Try and work on the fun stuff." :)
Matt Zimmerman, CEO of Canonical, gave an interesting talk on the
conflicts between managing a community and managing a company, where
transparency sometimes is just not possible for legal reasons, and the
lessons Canonical learnt and is learning along the way. They're still
figuring out the best practices. I like the "anything that could be
public, should be" policy, as opposed to the "anything that hasn't been
explicitly okayed cannot be talked about" from most other companies.
Canonical folks work to earn their commit rights like the rest of the
community, they're not granted automatically. Canonical is not doing too
bad for transparency because it's grown organically from people working
from home so when they need to talk, they do it on Freenode publicly.
That's interesting to me because I'm sure I read somewhere (can't
remember where though) that one of the problems with the OLPC project
was actually having offices, because whether or not you mean to you end
up talking about projects, issues and decisions and it looks to the
community as if you're working behind closed doors without involving
them.
Laura Cza talked about the Ubuntu community, all the ways to get
involved and also everything that is going on in Ireland relating to
Ubuntu and open-source events. I really look forward to the
Free/Open/Global Jam in March! I was a bit spoiled for the talk as I had
already read through the
slides
from the first version of the presentation a couple of weeks back :)
Finally the day ended with a talk on CouchDB, by a presenter who should
win some sort of prize for very realistic impressions of heads exploding
in the audience not only once but twice. I'm going to have to give a try
to CouchDB soon. I probably need to hear a couple more talks about it
before I really start getting my mind around the concepts and the "why
and when should I use it" (till then I'm doing quite fine with my
PostgreSQL adventures!).