This past weekend I left New York City and traveled to Columbus, OH for Ohio LinuxFest 2009 (OLF). Unlike many shows, such as LinuxCon and the now defunct OpenSourceWorld, OLF is entirely community run. That means you’ll notice a couple of different things: it’s much cheaper, there’s a wider range of attendees, and while many top name speakers attend, you’ll also get a smattering of other folks making their debuts on the conference circuit. Such was the case for me. OLF is where I presented the talk “Be A Wonk” that discussed how policy and law get made and what we can do as geeks to influence these issues.
As promised, I’ve posted my slides as the original OpenOffice.org format and also have posted a PDF version of my slides, which is decidedly less sexy. To make things even easier, here’s a copy of the slides on SlideShare. At some point I might record some dialog to go along with the slides, but for now this is what you get.
In previous years I may have been a bit too critical about some of the talks at OLF, there would usually be a few periods during the day that I couldn’t find anything good to see. I’m pleased to say that was never the case this year. Among an awesome schedule of talks there were standout talks from Paul Cutler about GNOME 3.0 (GNOME Shell could be some new hotness), Jorge Castro about how to fail at building a project, Tom Calloway about licenses for projects, and Mackenzie Morgan about how to handle translating between package management.
The keynotes were both excellent. Shawn Powers did a great job of setting up the conference in the morning, despite having lost his slides on the flight in. Although there was some Microsoft bashing in his talk, there was also plenty of realistic Linux bashing, the subject of which will be a future post. He addressed some of the failures of Linux and people selling Linux machines (GMA 500 anyone) and also encouraged us to be honest about the faults of Linux, rather than just glossing over them. The conference closed with Doug McIlroy — the man who invented Unix pipes — describing some of the problems with sophisticated software and how often we just need to approach the problem from a different aspect rather than adding in extra complexity.
I have to say that OLF 2009 was a smashing success and much better than previous years. This was my fourth time attending and the conference has certainly evolved — the team that plans and runs the conference it is much more polished and organized than in years past and we’re starting to get some great PR from the conference. There’s a solid pool of commercial sponsors along with numerous community based projects that return year after year. It’s good to see an all volunteer event thriving.
Going forward, there are good things in store for OLF. OLF has already put itself in a position as one of the most gender and ethnic friendly conferences in Open Source, thanks to their commitment to get women and other minorities represented. I’m pleased that many of the key organizers were women as were some of the great speakers. After the main conference they also held a workshop on diversity in Open Source — which addressed many topics regarding participation in OSS, one of which is why only 2% of OSS developers are female, but nearly 50% of professional software developers are female.
If you can make it to Columbus on the last weekend of September 2010, I highly recommend attending OLF 2010, as I’m certain it will be another great community organized conference.