OStatic

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.

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.

The Southern California Linux Expo opened registration for its 2009 event on December 30th. The event will take place February 20-22nd, 2009, in Los Angeles, California.

The SCaLE organizers have filled the available speaker tracks, and this year's events include co-hosted mini-conferences, such as the Women in Open Source Conference (a continuation of last year's discussions to encourage women of all ages to become involved in FOSS), and the Open Source Software in Education Conference (focusing on FOSS in the K-12 setting).

In October, I wrote about Camp KDE. This event was planned to complement Akademy, the traditional developer gathering for the KDE team, giving those unable to attend the former event (and specifically developers in the Americas) a better opportunity to gather and discuss projects.

Late last week, the Camp KDE 2009 presentation selections were announced. In addition to the presentations, the meeting will feature the traditional keynote addresses and birds-of-feather meetings.

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.

Today Linux Magazine, the Linux Foundation, and CeBIT organizers announced that they are taking applications for a limited number of free booths at the CeBIT 2009 conference. The global IT tradeshow, taking place March 3-8, 2009, in Hannover, Germany, will focus on open source software as a central theme for the first time.

From now until October 30th, open source projects are invited to bid for booth space at the conference.

The seventh August Penguin conference, for open-source programmers, managers, and users in Israel, took place in Tel Aviv earlier today. The August Penguin was sponsored by the Israeli open-source advocacy group, HaMakor ( the source ), and co-sponsored by a number of other organizations, ranging from the Israeli branch of the Internet Society, to small companies servicing the open-source sector, to Microsoft. About 300 open-source advocates gathered for half a day of technical and general lectures, as well as socializing, around the common theme of open source.