Where it comes to talking about all the technologies involved, I admittedly fell a bit short. I haven’t been keeping up on every TLA in the related technical spaces around oVirt and KVM, and I didn’t get through a full research on all the topics before the presentation. One of my strategies, though, is to just run this presentation to learn what is and isn’t appropriate for a presentation. So I told the audience it was a new presentation, thanked them for being beta testers, and acknowledged that some in the audience certainly know more on the topic than I do and I appreciate chiming in with answers.

Which happened a few times, thank ye gods and goddesses.

In addition, I chopped up the original 21 slide presentation in to 91 slides, with each slide covering one topic. This is similar to one paragraph for an idea when writing. The decision to do this came from a late-Saturday-night discussion with Josh Berkus, who has some fame and skill in presenting. (Once I learned that a slide of mine from a State of Fedora Lightning Talk had made it in to Josh’s deck-of-shame – slide 5 in this PDF -  I figured it was worth  a rethink-of-approach. Hey, we all make mistakes.;-D ) The 91-slide version was not optimal, but it was better than the 21-slide version.

Now, to help this slide show be more useful, I will do my part in filling out the notes sections where I actually know what I’m talking about. Jason Brooks is working on a consolidated deck that improves on this one, and I’ll get my notes in to that one as the canonical.

We had to wait until nearly the last minute to plan this trip, since I want to take my wife … and if she can’t go, that means I have reason to stay home. Hand-in-hand like that. We finally made a decision that works, booked our tickets, and now have to find a hotel in Paris.

Part of this trip is that from Sunday 25 September through Thursday 29 September, I’ll be working early in the day in Parisian cafes, and spending the evening with my wife and whatever friends we make as we go. We’ll be open, exploring, photographing, and looking for great food and wine (and music and dancing …)

Debora has a passion for the French language, which she has studied since she was a child, but has never visited France. Myself, I’ve never even been to Europe. We’ll get to break some personal barriers and have some fun.

So I’m looking for whoever I know, or friends of friends, to help us find what artistic, musical, underground (restaurant? catacombs?), alternative, and interesting Paris fun is out there. (I expect Milan to be completely filled with FUDCon, except Sunday evening when Debora and I will explore and discover together.)

Also, if you know a good hotel (conference one is full) or have an apartment we can rent for the week … let me know.

Now, to go sort out power adapters, SIM card for my Droid 2 Global, wireless broadband for the laptop …

One reason I’m going to FUDCon is to connect with people about open source cloud communities. While there isn’t enough momentum for an entire conference (yet), consider that at FUDCon Tempe this year there were enough discussions of cloud-related topics that they practically formed a track.

What will the cloud discussions at FUDCon Milan be?

I know of a few cloud/virtualization-related developers who are attending:

• Two folks from Red Hat’s Brno office who work on the Aeolus Project, Francesco Vollero and Michal Fojtik.
• Marek Goldmann, who works  on BoxGrinder as an oddfellow.
• Some other folks from Brno who may work on other parts of the operating system platform that are relevant to the cloud, at a very deep level?

OK, that’s not a very long list.

Who else is going? Who can we invite?

What interest can we generate? Anyone want to do  do a “build a cloud with Fedora” or something that attracts systems folks?

What is interesting for developers who want to build on top of these clouds as infrastructure and platforms?

One of us from the Cloud SIG can talk about the general activities in Fedora, so I count at least four cloud related talks in those I’ve listed here.

I had a talk to give, “Decentralized Collaboration with Open Source Tools: Technical and Cultural Implementation“, which thankfully Robyn Bergeron is giving on Sunday, and I’m sure it will be at least three times more interesting than if I did it. (This was one I inherited from Mel and Sebastian when they couldn’t attend.)

This year I planned to give two workshops … and scrapping those is a big disappointment, but I will re-imagine them for next year.

The first workshop was a half-day mini-Professors Open Source Summer Experience (POSSE) focused on Sugar and the XO laptop. Save that one for next year!

The second was a half-day workshop, “How to teach the open source way“. I have a new idea for all my talk proposals this year, and for SCALE I wanted to try it as a workshop. The goal is to turn a round-table discussion about the open source way (including an introduction to the handbook) in to something more. For a 3+ hour workshop, the first hour is sharing experiences, learning about different viewpoints in the room, and capturing information. The second and following hours are hands-on the wiki and mailing list, adding content from the session (video segments shot live, stories written, chapters edited), creating new threads on the mailing list, etc.

Anyway, that’s my rocking idea – I proposed something like that for OSCON, for the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, and I’m going to propose something like that for everything this year. Even with 40 minutes or an hour, if I come in with an active plan I bet I can get people doing stuff in that timeframe that benefits everyone’s knowledge while benefiting the project.

*sigh* See you all next time.

Unfortunately, the wonderful woman I’m lucky enough to be married to got hit with the effects of a bout with Crohn’s disease. Over all my years travelling for Red Hat, I have worked really hard to not let that travel overly affect my family, nor let problems here overly affect my showing up for where the work is.

Sometimes, though, that balance doesn’t hold together, as with this week. If you’d like to read more about the other side of that balance, you can catch up on Debbie’s blog, Waiting for the Cure. She’s doing OK, me and the girls are hanging in there, we’re hoping she’s out of the hospital on Monday.

Meanwhile, I’ve done some work to setup BigBlueButton so I can run a remote session at FUDCon about ‘The Open Source Way‘. So, there’s a fair chance that I’ll have a chance to participate after all!

On Wednesday, my girls and Larry and his girl are catching a train in Emeryville, CA.  It’s a 19 hour journey to Salt Lake City, which seems long but is only 7 more hours each way than driving without all the downsides of driving.  Also, it should be an awesomely beautiful ride, even at night.  We’ll get a chance to finish our presentations, explore the train, and relax.  Also, sleeping is more comfortable than in a driving car even without a sleeper car.

If you are attending, or know anyone else who is, here a list of the talks we’re giving:

• User Groups 2.0 – Larry talks about the modern user group experience. Friday 08 October at 11:30 am.
• opensource.com – How open source is changing your life beyond technology – I’m giving this talk about how the open source way gets applied in business, education, law, and so forth, as often discussed on opensource.com.  Friday 08 October at 11:30 am.
• Barn raising and musicians on the green – old ideas in a digital world – Friday night’s keynote by me will talk about how the open source way is rooted in a long tradition of how communities get things done.  My goal is to give a talk that pulls in the new-to-FOSS while giving the FOSS experienced something new to think about.  Friday 08 October at 4:30 pm.
• Fedora Birds of a Feather (BoF) – The classic session for Fedora friends, fans, and contributors to get together and discuss all things Fedora.  Friday 08 October at 7:30 pm.
• Ultimate randomness – girls in open source – Mirano, Malakai, and Saskia will reprise their talk from the SCALE 8x Women in Open Source Summit.  After this last weekend’s sleepover at my house, I can attest that this is a whole new presentation based on the original and will be well worth attending.  They’ll talk about TuxPaint, GIMP, OpenShot, and other stuff they do with open source. Saturday 09 October at 11:30 am.

Wow, that’s a lot of stuff!

Looking forward to the train ride and the chance to meet folks at a conference that is new to me (first UTOSC for my girls and me.)

After posting this, I was reminded that Ryan Rix is doing a BoF, Fedora, FOSS, and Schools.. The story of Fedora Campus Ambassadors at 6:30 on Thursday 07 October, and Robyn Bergeron is presenting Tour de OMNOM (Open Marketing, not Obscured Marketing at 1:30 pm on Friday 08 October. Of course, Jared Smith is giving the Thursday night keynote at 4:30 pm, Swimming upstream: How Linux distributions help the entire community.  Jared is also giving a second talk, Automated Deployments of Linux in a Small-business Environment at 6:00 pm Friday 08 October. *whew*

I wish that you would empower Earthlings everywhere to become active participants in the ultimate search for cosmic company.

Aside from being an amateur scientist and a lifelong wannabe spaceman, there is a more immediate and grown-up reason I care about this.  It has longed seemed to me, and I’m sure to many others, that SETI is a natural for embracing a FOSS community.  As the original programmers, some of whom have put 20 years in to the program, near retiring, it’s an opportunity to pass on the legacy in a way that lets SETI grow and scale.  The ability to run their code on commodity hardware, and openness to contributions from citizen scientists, makes the timing natural.  It’s the kind of project that could be completely free and open, and doing that will allow for the growth of an ecosystem around it, including new businesses.

Since SETI started, we have proven the FOSS development model time after time.  SETI, being a scientific pursuit under the aegis of “in the public interest”, there is also a moral imperative to reveal all the scientific methods used … including the source code.

The purpose of this summit is to bring SETI staff together with people who truly understand FOSS development.  I’ve seen the list of attendees, I’m pretty awed by some of the Bay Area big names they have drawn, but not surprised — around the Bay Area and beyond, SETI has a particular interest for many geeks.  It’s great that two efforts for the betterment of humanity, searching of companions in the universe and keeping humanity free, are coming closer together.

For myself, I’ll be bringing whatever brainpower that I can, but I’ll also be gently inserting The Open Source Way all over the place.  As a handbook, it’s a way to get much of the knowledge that you find at a summit, but in a handy format to carry around with you.

• 16 July our team loads up a mini-van and starts the 12+ hour drive to Portland, Oregon.  On the way we stop in Berkeley, CA to visit the wonderful folks at ZaReason.  Cathy and Earl, our proprieters, are loaning me one of their snappy new (and shiny red!) Terra HD almost-mini-notebook.  I’m giving it a full test run under Fedora for a number of reasons.  Personally, I want to see what life is like on a modern, small notebook; I’ve always been a “bigger is better” laptop selector (for myself.)  I also want to see how this system, loaded with stock Intel components, handles Fedora 13 and maybe rawhide (Fedora 14 to be.)  This also gives me a chance to help iron out any kinks in delivering Fedora on these systems, if any arise.  I’ve long been a fan of ZaReason’s approach to supplying systems to Linux users, they’ve clearly developed a following, and it’s great to see them reaching out to Fedora users with pre-installation and so forth.
  • The trip north is simply epic, with the Bay Area, Central Valley of California, Mt. Shasta, the Siskyous, and the Willamette Valley of Oregon.  Beautiful country, awe inspiring.  It is great to show it to some folks for their first time.
  • We arrive pretty late to Portland where we hook up with Robyn Bergeron, who I get to meet in person for the first time; she’s very cool.  The hotel is very nice right in the middle of downtown, and we settle in to be as fresh-as-possible for CLS the next day.
• 17 July we spend at CLS, participating to various degrees.  My take of the Community Leadership Summit (CLS) community is that there are a number of large groupings you can lump attendees in to.  Some are very experienced online community membesr and leaders.  Some have taken that community leadership to add a production of some sort to the necessary, core social need of being involved.  Common products are free and open  source software projects, but those aren’t the only ones in evidence.   Some are a subtle mix of social and something tangible that still can’t be held in your hand.  Within those groupings are people who are new, experienced, and everywhere in between.  I don’t think these differences are clear to everyone attending, and I think they create some potential disconnect in terms of how the people coming to CLS interact.  Just something to expect in a rather new community, and dinner conversation spurs Max to write a blog post at my prodding.   I attend a few sessions:  “Moving beyond the mailing list“; “You suck or conflict resolution in your communities” (where we hear the advice to, “Just remove them from your mailing list,” when a poisonous person problem in e.g. the Fedora Project is much more complex).  I meet up with lots of old and new friends, make new friends and contacts, have a great lunch downtown at the food carts, and do my best to do my best.  We end the day with sushi served by model railroad, which finally makes me happy.
  • There are two incidents that happen that day, one I observe that makes me feel very uncomfortable while it is happening, and the other I hear about a few days later.  Both happen in the morning plenary session, and both are disturbing instances of sexist behavior.  I think my blocking on writing about those has contributed to my not writing about the event overall.  I feel that my first real writing about this has to be to the CLS discussion list, because this is the community where the behavior happens and needs to be corrected.  At the moment, that is all that I’ve decided.  I’m still feeling that stunning and chilling effect that makes me want to go silent and pretend nothing is happening, all will be forgotten. Ick.
• Sunday 18 July starts out OK, although we are all a bit over-sleep-ish.  This morning I pitch a session to share about the community leadership handbook, The Open Source Way.  I give a good, thorough introduction, and try to illicit some feedback on what people need from such a book, as well as prodding them to use it as a canonical resource for the principles we are espousing all the time.  I also attend a few sessions, including  “You’re killing your community“, a wry look at why too much help can be harmful.  We end up having dinner at the top of Portland, at Portland City Grill overlooking everything, where happy hour yields us some nice food at a tasty price.  Late night Saturday and Sunday we pony up for some points-only poker, and I learn finally how Texas hold ‘em is really played.
• On Monday 19 July we head down to Oregon State University campus to meet with Drs. Tim Budd and Carlos Jensen.  The real and potential fall out from this trip are worthy of a separate blog post, and I think I’m going to write an article on it for opensource.com.  The summary is, I’m seeing an inverse mirroring relationship between the goals and methods of FOSS and academia.  It opens some really cool possibilities.
  • Also cool, for the rest of the week I get to meet multiple graduate students from OSU working on research that is useful and can make a difference: gender equality; enormous lack of joining and engagement; and so forth.
• Monday night is the Teaching Open Source education bird’s of a feather mini-session, and I get to meet even more interesting people.  Then I head back to Corvallis to …
• … spend Tuesday with a friend and his family.  I head back to Portland in time to help with booth setup, then back to the hotel where I’m surprised by the kids and Larry showing up earlier than I expected. Yay!  Food is sought, then bed.
• Early Wednesday I’m up to finish my part on the final slides Mel and I are using this morning at 10:40, “5 FOSS in Edu Projects That Changed the World“  All goes fine in our talk, it is actually pretty good, and the day is a bit more relaxing after that.  We work the booth and hang out in the expo hall, make trouble, and talk lots of stuff to lots of people, especially teaching open source (TOS) stuff and the open source way stuff.
  • Wednesday night I dip to an Android hands on, which includes my own Nexus One handset to start developing on and such.  Thanks Google, and thanks Tim Bray for organizing the session along with the awesome crew from Google.  My girls are going to be very jealous when I get back to the hotel room.
• Thursday we try to just improve on Wednesday, including getting one or two mini-talks going at the Fedora booth.  Lots more TOS talk, I have lunch with an old friend and colleague (downtown food carts for the win again.)  Now that I’m with the kids, I take it pretty easy at night, heading back in to the hotel early and getting wicked tasty pizza delivered by bicycle for dinner from Old Town Pizza.
• Friday I’m up early again, having a morning adventure walk and finishing updating my slides (source and all OSCON materials) for my talk today, “Being a Catalyst in Communities: The Science Behind the Open Source Way“.  Very smooth talk, I’m happy with the updated slides and after giving the talk a few times this year, I’ve got a good stride with it; also, I don’t go over time.  Then we pack everyone up, load the kids and Larry in the minivan, and head back south to Santa Cruz.  We arrive home about 3:30 Saturday morning, and here I am still.

If you are going, see you there.

Tomorrow morning I’ll get some goodies from Larry Cafiero up in Felton, and our media selection is going to be hand burned DVDs and CDs.  Doubt we have any labels, so a Fedora sticker and a permanent ink pen it is … I’ll bring a few ISOs on an external hard drive, plus a few USB keys for network/hard drive installs, so we can do quick updates and installations over USB.

No plans to present anything but I’m likely to pipe up about free culture and stuff, if prompted.

If you are going to be at OSB10, I’m talking Wednesday 02 June from 1:30 – 2:15pm in Broadway.  I arrive Tuesday morning and am back out Thursday by Lunch, so a nice long window to talk free and open topics.