[geeklog-devel] FrOSCon 2008

[Dirk Haun]

Okay, let's see what I can remember ...

FrOSCon 2008 was pretty good for us, I'd say. We had a lot of interested
people at our booth on Saturday. Sunday was a lot quieter, but still
quite some interesting contacts. So it was definitely the right decision
(after last year's flop with the project room) to have a booth.

The good thing with an open source conference such as FrOSCon is that
more people know Groklaw :-) That always helps.

What were people missing in Geeklog? One word: Postgres. I think we had
more requests for Postgres on Saturday morning alone than during the
entire LinuxTag (which was a four-day event). Something for the next
Summer of Code, maybe? Or a big bounty? (Cue Tony suggesting to switch
to a different DB layer ;-)

Why the increased interest in Postgres? I forgot to ask, but I'm getting
the impression that people (in the open source world) aren't comfortable
with the MySQL buyout by Sun and are starting to look for alternatives.

Other requests I remember:

- More flexible moderation. Some people had very specific ideas about
how moderation should work, but I think we can improve some things
there, e.g. by allowing to save changes back into the moderation queue.

- Integration and migration - that always comes up: How do I integrate
system "X" into Geeklog? How do I migrate my data from system "Y" to
Geeklog? CRM and shopping carts / ecommerce systems were mentioned a few
times.

Markus, anything else I forgot?


People: Christian Weiske dropped by and introduced himself (Hi!). Sorry
that I had to cut you off due my scheduled interview with RadioTux
(which reminds me that I haven't listened to it yet ...). Btw, do you
have an URL for that VMWare installation protocol / system that you mentioned?

I also met a bunch of the usual suspects - people I know from elsewhere.
There were even a suprising number of people from the Stuttgart area,
including someone from the Chaos Computer Club Stuttgart who invited me
to their next meeting - which features a talk by Kris Köhntopp (him
again ...).

Thomas Weinert from Papaya CMS mentioned experiments he'd done with
Baysian spam filters and filters based on the distribution of letters in
a post, so that you can recognize posts in foreign languages. That
sounded very interesting. I've argued before that people don't want to
train Baysian filters on their website, but he seems to have the
training down to a minimum.


Presentations: Well, the downside of having to man a booth is that you
miss all the great talks. I've only managed to hear the one by Andrew
Tanenbaum[1].

My own presentation (on the Atom Publishing Protocol) went well, I
think, although it ran a bit short (it probably didn't help that the
last time I gave a presentation on AtomPub was a 10-minute quickie at
the local WebMonday) - should have thrown in a few more examples, I guess.


In summary: Great conference, as usual. A lot more contacts for us this
year, so the booth was a good idea. I'll be back in 2009 :)


Thanks: To the FrOSCon organizers, who managed the growth over last year
just fine. To Markus Wollschläger for manning the booth with me on
Saturday. To evenos.de for lending us an LCD screen on Sunday.

For photos, try

- http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=froscon2008
- http://gallery.froscon.de

bye, Dirk

[1] http://www.flickr.com/photos/stiefkind/2792284466/


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