OStatic

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...

Documentation is a vital part of any open source project but it's often overlooked because it's not very glamorous. It's difficult to find the time to keep up with a project's constant changes and find people to come up with skillfully-written material. While bigger projects like OpenOffice and Eclipse can afford to hire documentation specialists, in most cases it's a job that's left to the FOSS community at large.

Documentation is a topic that's touched on often at large open source conferences but now it's getting a turn in the spotlight. Registration is now open for the Writing Open Source Conference slated for June 12-14, 2009 in Owen Sound, Canada.

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.

At the Southern California Linux Expo (SCaLE) late last month, Ubuntu community manager, Jono Bacon, spoke to attendees about community, and why it means so much to open source projects. Ryan Paul at Ars Technica put together a concise, informative overview of Bacon's SCaLE talk.

Bacon says that community -- and building a sense of belonging -- are crucial to growing and maintaining any open source project. No doubt this is due to the heavy element of voluntary participation in the open source world, but the belonging concept is one that any project or company -- open or closed, with paid employees or non-compensated volunteers (or any mix of the two) -- would benefit from applying to its management techniques. It is, without argument, one of open source's strongest traits.

Are you interested in open source software? Do you use Ubuntu at all? Will you be passing through the Los Angeles area later today or tomorrow? Think you'll be spending any time over the next two days near a computer with an internet connection? Are your weekend plans peppered with a few small gaps (or wide open expanses) of free time?

Yes? I've got some good news, then. This weekend is shaping up to be a lively one for open source enthusiasts, whether they're in sunny southern California or Tokyo, Japan.

For those in the vicinity of Southern California, SCaLE (the SoCal Linux Expo) is taking place this weekend. Lisa spoke with SCaLE organizer Gareth Greenaway a while back about how the event was shaping up, and the event schedule is packed with talks, tutorials and demonstrations for open source fans of any skill level.

If you'll notice, SCaLE is hosting a number of sessions for the Ubuntu Global Bug Jam. Not in California? Not to worry. The weekend-long Bug Jam is global in the truest sense -- and if you're unable to attend a real world meeting, the #ubuntu-bugs IRC channel can get you in on the action.