FOSScamp Boston
This weekend I traveled to Boston to attend FOSScamp, a BarCamp-style event held at the Hotel at MIT. FOSScamp was sponsored by Canonical and led into the Ubuntu Developer Summit, happening this week at the same venue.
I represented the OOo community in an informal way and gave my talk “Guerrilla Marketing OpenOffice.org in the New York Metro Newspaper” in front of a diverse audience including KDE developers, an FSF representative, and a number of others. It was well-received and brought to light the fact that lots of open source projects are working on evangelizing/marketing, but that we could improve our effectiveness by pooling our efforts and sharing our experiences more broadly.
One of the highlights of the weekend was meeting Mark Shuttleworth, whom I had communicated with only once (by email) before. He is a charismatic and well-organized leader, which I think is reflected in the successful, rapid growth of the Ubuntu community.
Lots of other great, intelligent and hard-working people attended FOSScamp, and the atmosphere of collaboration and openly exchanging ideas and knowledge will lead to the continued great success of the open source movement.
Edit: A few other mentions of FOSScamp have popped up today. Ars Technica picks up a quote from Shuttleworth’s introductory remarks about “brilliant flashes of innovation” that occur because of the free sharing of ideas in the open source world, and Corey Burger summarizes FOSScamp on the Ubuntu Fridge.