Texas Linux Festival

I am in beautiful Austin, TX where yesterday I attended the first Texas Linux Festival.  Overall, it was a great experience, and I think they did a great job especially since this was their first event.  The registration process was a little slow, but other than that it was well organized and well worth the trip.

The first keynote speaker was Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier, whose talk compared the Linux community with Music; it was very funny and very informative.  It was titled "A Musical Guide to the Future of Linux: Reprise".  Although he spoke on many topics, one that stood out in my mind in particular was that the Linux community need to diversify, and looking around the auditorium it was easy to see why.  The room was dominated by white males of different ages.  There were a few women, and a few people of color, but not a lot of diversity.  He challenged the community to change this, and being a woman of color I accepted that challenge and will do my part to bring more diversity to the fold.

After the keynote, there were three breakout sessions each hour.  Decisions, decisions what to choose?  Since I was with my Open Source Mentor, Belinda, I just followed her; the first session we attended was "Documentation Needs?  How FLOSS Manuals Can Help" by Janet Swisher and Anne Gentle. Great information on how to use Open Source to create manuals and books for Open Source Projects.

The next session I attended was "Open Source from the Trenches:  How to Get Involved as be Successful" presented by Chris Aniszczyk.  Chris talked about mentoring projects for college students, branding yourself for the job you want, not the job you have; and how to be paid in the Open Source Community.  He was an excellent speaker, and gave some useful information that I will post later.

The last session I attended before lunch was "The One Woman Web Team" (hmm, sounds familiar) presented by Katherine Druckman.  Katherine is the webmaster (I refuse to use the term webmistres!)  for Linux Journal.  She spoke on the multiple rolls of a one-person web team (oh I know it well) and she was right on point on all topics.  She said that her content management system of choice was "Drupal", and gave us a few suggestions on best hosting practices.  I was really excited about this because I want to migrate many of my web sites to OpenSource Content Management Systems.  So she gave me enough information to be dangerous :-)

Next was our quest for lunch.  Let me start by saying: 

I did not have on sensible shoes!!!

 (no high-tech/high-heels girl ever would).  

So by now my dogs were starting to bark.  We are staying at a wonderful hotel named the "Habitat Suites" which is about a mile from the conference.  So Belinda and I walked to the conference facility from the hotel.  Of course the floor at the center is concrete, and I visited each vendor's booth several times so I could get all of my geek bounty (CDs, Tee Shirts, Pens, Buttons, you know the drill.) Now, we had to WALK to find a place to eat.  Lord have mercy!    We found a Quiznos not to far away, and ate there.  Belinda got sandwiches to take back for some of the guys working the conference, I waited for her then we went back to the hotel for a short break.  Oh boy, more walking... 

• Off with the heels (which were really low heels for me) and on with my new FitFlops 
• Off with the jacket, and on with a tee shirt
• Put the hair in a ponytail

... Now I looked more like a respectable geek.  None of this Fashionista stuff, lol!

The first afternoon session I attended was "Five Important Topics in the Intersection of Open Sources Software and Education," presented by Max Spevack.  He spoke on how we can start introducing the concept of Open Source in our schools and universities. He emphasized how we should change the idea of "Learn First (college) then Do (work)" to "Learn While Doing".  He said that this way when students get out of college they would have real experience.  He also gave some examples of how some high school students had make valuable contributions to some Fedora projects.

The next session I attended was "With Software as a Service Is Only the Network Luddite Free?" presented by Bradley Kuhn, a very zealous man.  He talked a lot about cloud computed, and legal issues in the free and open source realm.  He also make some distinctions between "free" and "open" and the audience too seemed very passionate about this.  I thought his talk was interesting, although he was a little anti-twitter/anti-FaceBook for the community.  He also told us about Identica, which is an Open Source Mircoblogging alternative to Twitter, and this morning I did sign up to try it out.

I skipped the next session, and walked around talking to the vendors.  I meet some very interesting people and enjoyed the "networking" (which is opposite of Not working I learned today).

The last session I attended was also my favorite.  It was "A Year NTEU (in to) Ubuntu and the Open Source Community" presented by Amber Graner. Amber talked about her first year as an NTEU (non-technical end user) using Ubuntu and Open Source, and I must tell you this girl should run for some type of office, because if you weren't convinced to try Ubuntu before, you certainly would be afterward.  Her enthusiasm was very contagious, and I really enjoyed meeting her and her presentation.  (Hey Amber, I joined the Ubuntu Women's Group this morning!)

I skipped the final keynote to help breakdown booths and clean up.  Overall, it was a great conference, and I look forward to attending (and helping) next year.

Well, it is time to gather my grip to take a trip, back to Houston.