FOSDEM done

It's Monday, 2005-02-28, 00:25, and FOSDEM 2005 has been finished since a few hours. It went pretty well.

Even though I asked about three other people to do a writeup of the talk for the benefit of the general (European) Debian public who couldn't attend (one thing I think I have to delegate), I really can't resist doing one myself, too.

In my opinion, it went pretty well. The FOSDEM organisation is improving every year, with the FIT getting more and more experience on organizing an event of this magnitude—well, for most of them, anyway; I'll organize the key signing party myself next year. Alexandre Dulanoi is a nice guy, but this isn't something he should be doing.

Debian had a booth and a Devroom at FOSDEM. There were a few glitches, but overall it went well; we had a nice variety of subjects covered by our talks, with for every type of developer something interesting. Some of the talks were crowded (like Hanna's talk), some had less success (and usually, unfairly so). Since I was organising the DevRoom, I didn't have time to go and look at other talks, but that didn't matter—I had a nice time. Most talks were very interesting; my personal favourite was the aforementioned one by Hanna Wallach–interesting subject, well presented, receptive (and well-represented) audience–but there really wasn't any of them that got me bored. Hasn't happened in this event to me since it was still called OSDEM and I didn't have time on Saturday.

The booth was quite successful, too. We had T-Shirts (which were almost completely sold out), DVD's, Stickers, Posters, Flyers, Jazz (my Quadra950) doing a 3-hour d-i first stage installation run, and other interesting things. According to what I've heard, our booth was one of the more successful ones.

Anyway. Lessons learned:

• I need to create a checklist next time, so that I don't forget things at home.
• I need to ask a short bio from speakers, so that I don't have to improvise when introducing them.
• Using a First Come, First Serve policy for assigning speakers to time slots, rather than requesting full papers and deciding on subjects works extremely well.
• It might be preferable to bring our own multi-port switch next year. The FOSDEM network operators do their best to provide us with network gear, but they are, uh, 'slightly' undermanned. To put it mildly. When relying on the organisation, it might take a while before you have a working network.
• If we want to provide any service (such as a full Debian Mirror), talk to the aforementioned network operators before the event, so that this can be planned. It may help getting it actually available.
• When demo-ing a d-i installation on an m68k mac, be sure to mention the fact that the MacOS partition is required to boot the system to those performing the actual partitioning. It kinda helps ensuring that you don't have to do all kinds of problematic things trying to get that box to run the second day, and will most likely result in the Debian stand not having a completely pointless, powered-off, old computer being silly out there.
• Oh, and last but not least: Pray that the laptop isn't broken.

If you were involved in any part of the Debian presence at FOSDEM this year, and have anything to add to the above, please let me know (mail is preferred for that one; be sure to include the word 'FOSDEM' in the subject line). Your help is appreciated.

00:50. I'm going to bed now.