OStatic

This week, the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit began accepting proposals for its upcoming event. The event, aimed at encouraging interaction between KDE's Akademy and GNOME's GUADEC developer conference attendees, gives prospective speakers the opportunity to bring their passion to a more diverse audience.

Are you an Ubuntu developer/Launchpad member who had fate conspire against you, keeping you from the the Ubuntu Developer Summit this week at the clandestine Google Crittenden Campus in Mountain View?

It's not quite the same, but Mike Basinger has the details on how to be there without actually attending. For Launchpad registered developers, the UDS schedule page has links to live streams (video and audio) for the talks and presentations, as well as instructions on how to use VOIP to participate.

Not registered with Launchpad? More of an interested onlooker than a developer? The Jaunty Jackalope UDS attendees have rigged a number of virtual postcards for the event featuring more than the local weather and obligatory wish you were here.

The GNOME and KDE projects recently decided that their upcoming developer events -- GUADEC and Akademy, respectively -- will be held simultaneously in the same location. Both projects hope this will foster communication and collaboration between their developer pools, and ultimately strengthen open source desktops.

The joint event, the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit 2009, will be held July 3-11, 2009, in Gran Canaria (Canary Islands, Spain), and will be hosted by Cabildo, Gran Canaria's local government.

The KDE project has announced the date and some detail regarding its first annual Camp KDE event. This developer conference was conceived at the KDE 4 Release Event that took place earlier this year in Mountain View, California, and aims to get developers all over the world more involved in the KDE project.

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.

How do you manage, grow, and foster active involvement in a community? One way might incorporate planning several events at approximately the same time and venue. This is why you can rest assured that the organizers behind the Community Leadership Summit can help you learn to manage your project's community in the most effective way possible.

Jono Bacon, Ubuntu's community manager, officially announced the unconference (an event so focused on discussion that an open, organic schedule is required) on Sunday. The event itself takes place the 18th and 19th of July in San Jose, California. The summit is mere hours before OSCON 2009 kicks off -- in the very same convention center.

Monday evening, the Linux Foundation's Amanda McPherson revealed the identities of the lucky finalists in the We're Linux video competition . The contest, launched in January, received over 90 submissions from Penguinistas worldwide. Finalists were determined based on community voting and input from a panel of open source and media personalities.

The winner and two runners-up will be announced tomorrow at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit. The overall winner will be traveling, courtesy of the Linux Foundation, to Tokyo, Japan in October to participate in the Linux Foundation Japan Linux Symposium (which is co-located with the Linux Kernel Summit this year).

If you happened to be perusing the recent commits to the upcoming 2.6.29 Linux kernel release (and why wouldn't you be?) you probably noticed Linus Torvalds' stamp of approval that cleared Tux to go on walkabout this release cycle, and welcomed Tuz as Linux's substitute mascot.

Tuz is a Tasmanian Devil cleverly disguised as a penguin. Assurances abound that Tux is on sabbatical, and the screeching, meat-eating endangered marsupial from Australia hasn't devoured him. How did Tuz get from the forests of Tasmania to the Linux kernel tree? It started at a conference...