I attended POSSCon today - it's a first year - seemingly business oriented event - more so than community oriented. I actually came across the event accidentally, and signed up last minute. Parking was about 1.5 blocks. from the event. When I got down to the building there were 65 people waiting outside. I was impressed by the turnout - as I sit inside the auditorium there are over 100 people here now. The Keynote from the Blue Cross Blue Shield guy seemed to be spreading a lot of FUD about the liability of using open source software. I thought that was all over with?? Maybe I have just been desentized after all the SCO stuff. Next up was Greg DeKoenigsberg - he was a welcome relief - adding a little humor and doing a base level presentation of what open source means, and how and where it excels. The audience is really more IT and business people and not really Linux or open source zealots, so this level of talk was good. After Greg was done we took a break and I setup an impromptu 'booth' and talked to people about Fedora, and Linux, etc. I say impromptu because there were no other booths, and one hadn't really been planned. Greg had brought a stack of ~50 LiveCDs and DVDs for a presentation I was planning on making in Greenville. I initially brought about 20 of the LiveCDs that Greg brought - within 5 minutes they were gone along with the stack of business cards I had set out. I retrieved more - and would guess that all 50 were gone with 30 minutes. I put my business cards up front and told people that if they didn't receive a LiveCD that they should send me an email and I'd make sure they received one. A shocking number of people at this open source conference haven't tried open source software to any depth - not even OpenOffice.org Following this was a really basic demonstration of OpenOffice.org. The presenter was a professor at the University of South Carolina who had her students create end-user howtos for OpenOffice.org this past year. I introduced myself to her and told her about the varied documentation projects we had at the Fedora Project and told her that I'd be happy to come down and introduce the Fedora Project to her students and see if we couldn't have some of their projects help Fedora out. She seemed receptive to this thought. I also met a comp sci. professor from Benedict College who was interested in Fedora and I told her I'd follow up with her and see if we could at least introduce Fedora for them. During lunch professors from two other universities talked to Greg about incorporating Open Source into their Comp Sci programs and some of those conversations seemed like they have potential for doing interesting things, perhaps akin to Seneca College, though it's probably far too soon to speculate. The following session was from an IP lawyer - he seemed to lean towards more FUD. Though he has 20+ years in IP law, I really missed the EFF types or the Duke Law people. The last presentation was from a Ruby developer who worked for the state. His presentation was somewhat interesting and he revealed that they are hosting a Ruby Conference. I told him I would see if schedule allowed for Fedora to show up and talk. The final event was a roundtable that had people from small and large businesses answering questions about their open source deployments. Someone asked the question if they encouraged their employees to contribute to the open source software projects they used. One of the panel members said that they would be upset if their employees were working on things other than 'work'. I posited the view that contributing back to the community was invaluable for the following reasons: 1. It builds expertise like no training every will. 2. It potentially means that $feature_desired_by_company will be implemented or implemented sooner. Being part of the community means that they can help point the project in a direction they want. I further argued that one of the panelists had said that they offer a 'disclaimer' to their customers that they are using Postgresql as their RDBMS as they consider it a risk point. I offered that if they were seeking to allay customer fears they'd 'force' one or more of their employees to contribute so they could show their customers that they know the product well enough that they contribute. One of the business-types had the value dawn on him - but said that while some of these businesses may not be able to justify 'development' time they could certainly justify writing 'test cases' and doing QA on projects they were using. Neither of us seemed warmly received by the business types on the panel - but you could see light bulbs going off around the room and it generated a number of post-event conversations about getting involved in open source projects. I have around half a dozen people to follow up with now.
It was a good turnout for a first year event. I wish it had been better advertised, particularly outside of Columbia. I also wished they had balanced end-users with community a bit more - but I made a number of contacts that would probably have not shown up to something much more geeky.