FOSDEM Thoughts

As promised I am going to do a quick summery of the time I had at FOSDEM 2010.

FOSDEM itself

I thought the meet-up itself was very well organised, there were lots of well manned stands, including most of the big Linux distros, all of whom gave away free CDs of which I took full advantage, they will be very helpful as soon as I get some more time to work on Toucan 3 again as the more variations I can test it on the better!

As well as my time wandering the floors talking to people I visited a few of the other talks, the two lightning talks before mine, two of the keynote talks and one of the talks in the KDE room. Needless to say they varied in quality but were generally very good, I have certainly learnt a lot about what works and what doesn't in presentations.

Perhaps one of the things missing was an easier way to see small projects, I am sure there must have been a lot of developers who work on small projects, the sort that would be a good fit here at PA.c as we already have a most well known projects, but it is hard to know as they don't have stands (as the minimum requirement is two people) and they don't necessarily do a lightning talk as space was pretty limited.

The PA.c Lightning Talk

The video is now up and feedback both now and on the day was generally very good, I had a few people come up after the talk with more questions and a number commented on how much they liked it. I certainly enjoyed myself! The presentation didn't go perfectly as there was an issue with the pdf (the background showed heavy banding, basically unusable) and so the odp version had to be used, but then the required font wasn't available on the pc so a few of the words and such ran over their margins, nothing major, just not as perfect as I hoped.

In retrospect (although I haven't watched the video and probably won't for some time) I think I performed fairly well, it is by far the largest audience I have ever presented in front of and really the first presentation of this type that I have done! I have a fair few ideas on improving it though and hopefully I will get a chance to reuse it, more on that in the future!

Summary

Overall I had a great time, the city is lovely and travel was easy, the Eurostar and then the public transport system in Brussels made it virtually pain-free. Hopefully in time for next year we can get organised and run a stand, I think it would be the only major way to improve over our showing this year! Any constructive feedback is of course welcome