In a year that's been pretty rough on commercial conferences, community run events like FOSDEM, SCALE, SouthEast LinuxFest, LinuxFest Northwest and this past weekend's Ontario GNU Linux Fest are thriving. Why is that? Community conferences win out for a number of reasons.

Attending conferences is a big part of my job, and over the years I've started to take note of what events are worth attending and which events aren't. By and large, it's the smaller community events that are worth your time and money.

Although the next Linux.conf.au isn't until January, 2010, it's never too early to start planning. Conference organizers have put out a call for papers and miniconfs so if you've got an idea you want to share, now's the time to put together your proposals.

Past conferences have proven to be very popular with the FOSS community and draw speakers from all over the world, including Jon "maddog" Hall and Bdale Garbee. Linus Torvalds has even been known to make an appearance or two. Benjamin Mako Hill, is the first scheduled speaker slated to attend next year's event in Wellington, New Zealand.

The OSCON (Open Source Convention) conference is quickly approaching, to be held July 20th through 24th in San Jose, California. The schedule and roster of speakers is becoming finalized, and looks to be very interesting this year. Keynote speakers include Google Open Source Program Manager Chris DiBona, and Intel's Imad Sousou. In addition to the sructured, scheduled events at this year's OSCON, there will be an unstructured "Unconference." This is an on-the-fly program created by OSCON participants. Here are more details.