Another year over and FOSDEM has come and gone.  It was an amazing weekend, full of interesting talks and meeting people.  With so many attendees on this subject, there are so many opinions on subjects, technology, languages and operating systems flying about it can get heated. It’s also rather entertaining!

Friday night I met up with the Freenode Staffers for dinner, I’ve only been involved in Freenode since last summer, and work on community areas, so nice to meet the folks who do a lot more work than I do.   Followed by the Friday beer event, leaves you set up for the weekend ahead of you!

Saturday morning consisted of me in the lightning talks room, nice way to ease myself into the day after the night before! I popped down to the Ubuntu booth, passing all the others and listening to what was being said, great chatterings.  I brought along some extra Karmic, Kubuntu , Server CDs and stickers as we’d some left over to give out to folks.  Nice to put the faces to the names and chat to people. Always great, even though I am woeful with names!

Popping in and out of talks, and finding people I chat to on IRC to wave hi, and grab a bite to eat with others was great.  I got to bounce ideas off others and get some feedback, which was handy. Saturday night was the Ubuntu Dinner, if there were folks going we asked them to sign up, most did.  Thanks to JanC who organised it, as to seat a large number of people is rather difficult. 18 of us went for dinner, nice to chat to people sitting down,Muharem Hrnjadovic from the Launchpad team joined us, nice for community and non community to meet up a these events. Went to the GNOME drinks meet up as it was close by, but I really needed an early night so homewards I went.

Sunday was the day I’d been looking forward to, more lightning talks, followed by Make your users happy, “cloudify” your app with desktopcouch which was interesting. Afterwards I ran to the Ubuntu Debian talk, but this was wedged packed, I got to hear the first 2 minutes before I had to leave due to the heat and over crowding.

Lucas is both a Debian and an Ubuntu developer and stated that at the beginning of the talk, followed by he had friends on both teams and the talk was being recorded, trying to lighten the humour I suspect as the room was very packed and a show of hands for Debian was rather over whelming where as when it was show of hands for Ubuntu maintaining, it was one other person.

It’s a developer conference so I must admit I found that rather saddening to be honest.  There was a distinct lack of Ubuntu developers there for what ever reason, it’s the largest OSS developer conference that I’m aware of, I could be wrong. You could see the sea of Red Fedoras and Debian kilts, BSD, Gnome, KDE and many more around the conference.  So it would seem Ubuntu should have a larger presence at it.

Afterwards I went to the short presentation from the Mozilla team on WoMoz -  Woman and Mozilla and  then chatted to some of the women involved and exchanged contact details once I explained my role in what I do.  I pointed out their ideas sounded great, and that other groups had done similar, we should pool our resources together. I was even shortly interviewed for the Mozilla team on women in open source, for those who don’t know me, I hate speaking in public on my own, in discussion groups I’m fine.  On my own, I tend to get rather embarrassed and speak even faster than normal, plus I also hate cameras and usually want to punch the person with the camera pointing it at me.

The afternoon was filled with more lightning talks, this time they were from the  Mozilla room, then finally the end talk for me was the Inside StatusNet: How Identi.ca Works.

It was a very enjoyable weekend, I’m glad I went, following the tweets/dents for #fosdem did help to highlight some of the other talks I didn’t get to, which was rather handy.  Lots of the talks were recorded for later viewing.  One tweet that caught my eye was – Debian’s conclusion about Ubuntu at FOSDEM, add that to google and you get the interesting views of the talk which features photos of slides of the presentation, and also a thread