Open Source and Other Things
We arrived as earlier as we could, after the long first day of OggCamp 11. Again we walked to the station, train to Woking, and change there to Alton to get to Farnham; with an extra bus from Aldershot to Farnham because engineering works on Aldershot.
The organizers wished we had a nice hangover, but our problem wasn’t beer related, we were just sleepy.
We started with a nice talk by Lorna Jane Mitchell. I was interested in this talk, but as I was listening to Lorna I realized that I was been already there.
I’ve been involved in open source advocacy since 2002, and I’ve been lucky enough to focus my professional career in open source technologies and services since around 2004, and at the end I agree with Lorna in that this is not something you do to make you CV look nice but because at some point it becomes part of who you are.
It was a nice talk, but I do like slides… specially when I’m sleepy!
When I was based in Valencia I was reasonably active as Fedora ambassador, and even organized two editions of Barcamp Valencia, but since I moved to UK I’ve been quite demotivated (Gnome 3 doesn’t help, in case you’re wondering, but it’s not the main reason). I’ve attended different LUG meetings (D&C GNU/Linux User Group, Silicon Corridor Linux User Group and now the Surrey Linux User Group ), and it’s a positive experience, but it’s more a social meeting than an advocacy adventure (after all, the attendees are already Linux users).
So I was very interested in this talk, because may be it could be a good idea to get in touch with the Ubuntu community in the UK (after all I’m an Ubuntu user since Warty).
Alab Bell directed the talk/meeting, looking for different activities to promote Ubuntu in the UK. It was interesting, although I found quite surprising that he’s not a regular of LUG meetings (in fact he said he attended one meeting once). I mean, I would expect a LUG meeting a good starting point to promote Ubuntu (which is still Linux, isn’t it?).
I’ll keep an eye on the Ubuntu UK LoCo, just in case I can help.
Alex was attending the assembly demo performed by the skilled Ken Boak, and I could see the finishing touches to the assembly of a Nanode board. I don’t remember what happened, but Ken was supposed to bring some Nanode DIY kits to sell, but finally he brought only a couple (that was definitely insufficient! :P).
We already had the pleasure to meet Steve in Barcamp Oxford last year, but we had never seen his talk and it was really interesting.
The accessibility support of open source (specially Gnome) is excellent, and although I already know it from different articles and posts, I’d never seen some of the applications in action.
I knew some of these features of GTK+, but I didn’t know that using them could be that big difference for people with disabilities.
Finally we attended the raffle, without luck… but it was really fun (Alan Pope going up and down delivering the prizes), and it was a nice finish for two intense days in which we had the chance to meet a lot of interesting people and learn some new things.
Finally Janos, an Hungarian guy that we meet the first day, was so kind to give us a lift to Guildford so we felt like we were tele-transported home instead of suffering the annoyances of the engineering works. Thanks Janos!
The problem with this kind of event is… having to wait one year for the next edition!
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