Its a Monday morning and my mind is still respooling the events of Lugradio live , it is attempting to categorise and understand all the things I saw and spoke about.Those of you who are not familiar with the open source community or indeed the podcast may wonder whats so different about Lugradio as a exhibition. The short answer; money. This is not a show about commercial vendors and business to business networking, this is not an exhibition where the few and the unfinanced are excluded in favour of huge displays and many coloured lights. This is a show about the people and their relationships to each other through the concept of Open Source software and its many nuanced forms of sharing.
This is a one show where everyone can have a stake in their contributions to the community that is open source.
It was not however without its corporate sponsors and the very generous content of the freebies schwag bag reflected the commitment from Google, Sun, Bytemark, Redhat, Ubuntu and ORielly to the open source community. The fantastic Google Notebooks ( Moleskine styled notepads ) were in evidence everywhere you turned.
Thanks to TevaD for the following image of the schwag bag contents.
As usual OReillys very own Belle of the Bookstall Josette was on hand to keep us all line and to help us all with our monthly OReilly “Fix”. Thank you Josette for all your effort and work and delivery and smiles and conversation and knowledge.
As a member of the Ubuntu community myself, and a few other willing volunteers and helpers made available many copies of Ubuntu and Edubuntu CDs and took time to answer various questions, retorts
and comments fielded by the visitors.
A big thanks goes to John Levin, Gary Kearly, Dave Morris and Dave Walker for helping man the stand and run for coffees. as you can
see John Levin was entirely overwhelmed.
The Ubuntu-uk Birds of a Feather met and since there was no IRC available we restrained the conversation to a discussion of topics from the meeting agenda and to discuss what it is that can be done to help people feel less intimidated and more included and able within the Ubuntu community.
If there was one gripe; one consistent gripe about Lugradio events its the fact that despite the promise of Cloning technology being available I was simply unable to attend every talk and speaking event at the show. I have to hope every one of the able Yellow shirted crew of the event were succesful in uploading videos of the discussions as soon as possible.
Of the talks I could attend a brief synopsis will follow later this week but heres the trailer.
Malcolm Yates, he of the Canonical and Bearded way , was obviously going to talk about Ubuntu and Canonical and in doing so dropped some very impressive figures. Clearly though the topic of Dell and Ubuntu sales in the UK was of interest to me and of this Malcolm could only smile and walk away. What could that possibly mean ?
Becky Hogge of the Open Rights Group gave us a precis of what the ORG has achieved in the last year. For the work of a little over a year the ORG has made some big differences to the hearts and minds of decision makers out there today. Do not underestimate the power and persuasion of this Campaign Society, please get involved and contribute your £5.00 a month to help them get some of our messages across.
Gervasse Markham I would like to suggest that you are now responsible for the sudden increase in extreme pedantry and careful rephrasing that every attendee of your talk “How to win Every Arguement” will now suffer from. Yours was an excellent insight into the hearts and factitious minds of many Geeks today.
As with all great community events there were many people brought from all around the globe to gather in one place and share ideas and drink a special mention goes to the following.
Chris DiBona of Google whose own radio podcast “Geeks In Space “ predates RSS and Lugradio was shocked to be reminded of such history and it was a excellent to finally meet in person someone whom youve been aware of for well over 8 years!
Ted Heagar of Bungee labs ( not the Studios ) presenting the Bungee Labs development has already made good on his promise and sent me my invite key. I really am annoyed at having missed his presentation since there is clearly many good reasons for me to closely look into what Bungee Labs are presenting today. Needless to say he probably spent much of the show rehashing the his own Novell exit saga.
Rob Marris M.P. for Wolverhampton Southwest stopped by the show on Sunday and was very generous to have given me some time to talk about Open Source and its adoption within society in general. Im not going to agree with him on the training issues but I do agree with him that we need to see the Government making more use of Open Source.
David Godwin, of Pale Purple, who was admittedly kept a little busy crewing the show for the weekend stopped by for 10 mins to talk more about what Pale Purple are developing today and products they are considering. Pale Purple, like myself, are out there in the SME market and talking about Open Source and FLOSS. Since a certain Chairman of a Small Business Organisation feels that Linux and OSS are not relevant to business today I really want to see more Small Businesses start up to support and encourage Open Source for the SME market. Its people like David and Kat that are helping get the word out there to other SMEs and they would welcome all the support and opportunities they can receive.
Oh yeah and then there were these guys; Jono Bacon, Stuart Langride, Adam Sweet and Ade Bradshaw. They did quite a good job as well.
Overall a great two days, an excellent venue and heres to the run down to Linux World Expo 2007.
if you would like to see more pictures from the Event search on Lugradiolive2007 or click here
