Czajkowski

Last weekend saw the Ubuntu Ireland team take part in the Ubuntu Global Jam. We did it slightly differently as I’m of the opinion if an event doesn’t fully work for your team tweak it a bit and it’ll work just as good.

We did just that, we invited many of the different user groups to come along and work on their projects together. This was great as we got to hear about all the other things they were doing and interest in projects were increased.

The morning started off slowly with me wiping my lovely mini 9 which came from Dell with hardy on it. It now has a clean install of Karmic on it. It would have been nice to be able to do an upgrade from hardy to Karmic but that wasn’t possible due to the install I got on the machine bought from Dell. *mutters*

Walking around the room and meeting people was great, putting faces to names as I am the worst person for remembering names! thankfully Qamir had brought along stickers so we could write our names and group on them which did help matters greatly!

Some groups broke off into smaller groups to work on their projects and hold small workshops and tutorials on their areas. This was great as it gave folks a chance to hear about the work that was being done and where they could get involved.

Finally lunch came which was very nicely sponsored by Microsoft , and a big thank you to Liam Cronin who helped arrange this and make it possible went down a treat with folks, much chatting at lunch and mingling happened which again was the point of the day.

Afternoon session kicked off with some lightning talks from some of the user groups that were there and hopefully some of them will be talking at OSSBarcamp in April.

While we man not have gotten as much as we’d have liked done on the Ubuntu side of things, we did get a lot of interest in the group. More people have joined our IRC channel and have offered to help.

Sunday I was bored ( it happens ) and sent a mail to the mailing list saying I was going to do some spring cleaning of our wiki pages and would be online. Folks joined in and we did a nice job, so well done.

The day could not have been possible without the help of David Scanlon from Enterprise Ireland. It’s great to see these groups come out and support Open Source here in Ireland.

Enterprise Ireland is the government agency responsible for the development and promotion of the indigenous business sector. Our mission is to accelerate the development of world-class Irish companies to achieve strong positions in global markets resulting in increased national and regional prosperity.

I’d like to see more of these events happen throughout the year here in Ireland as I think they are very beneficial to everyone involved and a lot of information was shared with one another. More pictures are here in the usual spot

Well I seem to be getting some feed back via the blog, ILUG mailing list and twitter. So many mediums and messages left in multiple areas I said I’d do up a small update of what I’d collected so far. This update is by no means final and I welcome any more suggestions of topics and speakers (hint!!)

Speakers who have expressed an interest and topics they would like to talk on.

Patrick Collison - Fom his language necrophilia, he is willing to talk about badass interactive dev environments — Genera from the Lisp machines of olde, SLIME and such from modern Lisp implementations, Squeak Smalltalk, etc.

Bryn M. Reeves - Red Hat – Magicing LVM back from oblivion under the “Data Recovery”

Alan Cox – Red Hat - still to confirm fully.

Qamir Hussain - Ruby Ireland – Using open source tools in the tech business, i.e. How my business uses them and the advantages/ disadvanges of them.

Noirin Shirley – Open Source – More Than Code; Understanding Open Source Licenses; Open Source – Collaboration Tools.

Php Ireland – hopefully

Topics that folks want to hear about but I need speakers for:

• Using linux based tools to developfor embedded systems that don’t necessarily have an operating system installed.
• How advancements in open source virtulization techology like XenSource is changing things.

Full list and comments are here.

Microsoft have said they would like to partipcate in this event so I looked for topics for them, suggestions put foward inclunde:

• How MS Came up with the Source ForceIdea
• How MS are going to make OOXML implemtable