Greek openSUSE Ambassador's actions: openSUSE Conference 2011 Greek's Review

The openSUSE conference is over. Nirenberg was full of geekos attending the conference. Almost 400 visitors have shown up for attending the sessions about technical and community matters and have fun at the parties and other events organized.

Talks & Workshops!

Everything was interesting. People couldn't decide which session to attend! There were many technical sessions from low-level development to kernel tools. There were marketing and social sessions, focused on how openSUSE can be spread all over the world! Packaging sessions weren't missing and they were detailed teaching the attenders how to create a package from scratch! There were interesting conversations like Robert Schwelkert’s talk, about “Where do we improve?” where we talked about the improvements that must be done at documentation, wiki, translations, Bugzilla and other stuff.

From the openSUSE Conference couldn't be missing the openSUSE project meeting where we discussed about the upcoming elections and the status of openSUSE Foundation and a number of interesting development ideas about the distribution.

The one presentation to remember was by Gregory Zysk about “Introduction to Cross-Cultural Communication, Conflict and Collaboration. After presenting his model of cross-cultural communication model and his ambitions, he made an awesome test... He made everyone in the room pick a mate that he hadn't worked with him at all or get to know and after he gave us two papers of different scenarios he made us conflict and find a common solution to solve the scenario!

Furthermore, from the openSUSE conference couldn't be missing the incredible openSUSE women! There was a conversation about “How to get more Women into openSUSE” by Lydia Pintscher of KDE who talked about the difficulties that women face in a community and how can a community attract and get more women.

Moreover, there were interesting presentations based on openSUSE sub-projects like Education, and Tumbleweed. Also, there was a topic about openSUSE in commercial, and especially for enterprise and other services which gives us the impression that openSUSE is spreading and deployed everywhere!Last but not lease, there were “Lighting Talks” from people of openSUSE and other communities, introducing themselves, talk about their jobs, their hobbies, their interests and in general talk about their everyday life.

Have a lot of fun!

Every day was different! The beautiful decorated location and the German beergarden was perfect for geekos to have fun. There were different happenings everyday after the sessions were over. “Pizza Party” with many pizzas and beers, “Barbeque Party” with sausages and other meet, “Rodeo Texas Party” with poker tables and bull riding, different live concerts with interesting music like the “8bit Music concert” where the music came from tweaked GAME BOYS. Last, it was awesome that we went at a city nearby to see the man that made us the “Old Toad” openSUSE beer! We were guided in the factory rooms and saw how beer is made. After that, we ate local food and drunk local beer at the local restaurant where we stayed there till late at night discussing, drinking beer and having fun!

Summary

We are happy that we participated at the openSUSE Conference successfully. People from all over the worlds were there in order to meet the geekos and attend the sessions. Thanks to our sponsors, we had a great internet connection and many parties and happenings for geekos to attend.