Re: Fwd: Submit a proposal to speak at OSCON 2012

On 12/17/2011 4:39 PM, Lydia Pintscher wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 17, 2011 at 15:50, Jos Poortvliet <[email protected]> wrote:
>> On Thursday, December 08, 2011 12:07:41 Lydia Pintscher wrote:
>>> Heya folks :)
>>>
>>> See below the CfP for OSCON 2012. It is one of the conferences we should be
>>> a part of in 2012.
>>
>> Should we? I actually few to Portland for the CLS (the days before OSCON) and
>> simply flew back when OSCON started - not even bothering to pay a few hotel
>> nights to be there. That upon advice from some ppl including Greg KH that the
>> event is not worth going to... Just saying, if your experience is different
>> and/or someone wants to go, fine. I just wouldn't trow money at it unless you
>> know it's valuable.
> 
> I was there the year before and yes I believe it is valuable to show
> we're alive there to get mind-share if we can make it happen.

I was at OSCON in 2010 (I attended Jono Bacon's Community Leadership
Summit with Lydia and Valorie, and stayed for OSCON via funding from my
job).

OSCON is, mostly, not a conference for people who care about open
source. It's a conference for people who care about making money off of
open source. New languages to get your product to market faster (half
the talks seem to be about new languages); lots of SaaS/cloudy stuff;
lots of embedded stuff. There are still some more community-friendly
tracks and talks. I attended one about Arduinos, for instance, that was
quite interesting.

All that said, I think KDE benefits if we give talks that show a few things:

1) Libraries that help get mobile products to market faster or
performing better. e.g. kdelibs (libok as an example of what can
happen), and add-ons to Qt, which is getting a lot of new looks as a
fast, low-power development language for devices that want to maximize
power/watt and lessen SWaP.

2) Applications/frameworks that help get mobile products to market
faster or performing better. Plasma Active is increasingly telling a
good story here, as using it to construct a UI for a custom device is
increasingly possible from what I know.

3) KDE tech on top of Qt, targeting cross-platform desktop developers.
We'll have a much better story here as things progress with splitting
kdelibs into gui/nongui bits.

I don't think there's too much to talk about outside of that. For the
purposes of the U.S.-based business users that dominate the conference,
Linux on the desktop is uninteresting and dead (as told by the sea of
Macs running OS X that made me very aware of often being the only
non-Mac in the entire room).

I think it's worth it for KDE to have a presence there, but only if we
have the right stories to tell, and, truthfully, if we bury the KDE name
a bit in the talk titles so that the talks aren't dismissed out-of-hand
by prejudiced attendees who might otherwise find the talk useful.

--Jeff


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