End of Day 2

Well today:
~ started this blog
~ finalised finding and contacting conferences
~ contacted Zookeepr folk

Tonight I hope to:
~ get Zookeepr's virtual env going (Vagrant)
~ collate conference survey results that I've received already (and there have been a good number!)
~ finalise finding and reviewing existing software projects, put in here, I've already put in a decent amount of work in to this.

Tomorrow I hope to:
... do anything that's not complete on above list with the background research stuff
~ start looking at some actually software design and code

#1: Existing Open Source Conferences

Initially I simple googled "open source conferences" and started working through this list.

Then I found this page maintained by Jeffrey Osier-Mixon (http://www.jefro.net/), for which I'm extremely grateful:
http://jefro.wordpress.com/open-source-conferences/

Using these two resources then carefully poring over all the sites, I generated a short list. This list was based on the criteria:
~ had obvious contact details
~ had an open "vibe" (excluding something like this: http://e.ubmelectronics.com/armtechcon/)

Over the course of about 24 hours I contacted 22 conferences, and felt satisfied with the details publicly provided by another 11 (the best example being: http://opensource.com/colophon)

Short list:
http://opensourcebridge.org/
http://www.southeastlinuxfest.org/
http://www.froscon.de/
https://www.eiseverywhere.com/ehome/index.php?eventid=31601&
http://www.opensourceworldconference.com/en
http://www.posscon.org/
http://flourishconf.com/2012/
http://oss2012.org/
http://www.oscon.com/oscon2012
http://www.linuxtag.org/2012/
http://connect.linaro.org/events/event/linaro-connect-q2-12/
http://www.hfoss.org/
http://www.indianalinux.org/cms/
http://www.penguicon.org/CMS/
http://texaslinuxfest.org/
http://www.linuxsymposium.org/2012/
http://openhelpconference.com/
http://www.oscon.com/oscon2012
https://ohiolinux.org/
http://www.openworldforum.org/
http://www.t-dose.org/
http://goscon.org/
http://fsoss.senecac.on.ca/2011/
https://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/lsfmm-summit

Plan of Attack

The point of this course is to:

• Short presentation - 15%
• Project work - 45%
• Project study - 40%

This is the where the points are.

But the real point is to truly understand how OSS works and how the project works.

Because I'm slightly mental I have to do it a certain way I it give me indescribable intellectual satisfaction to have the opportunity to do the background work that I want (total nerdgasm).

For the record despite all this research I know that the project that I'm going to choose is Zookeepr. This is fait-accompli.

---

The plan of attack that really formed for me last night is as follows:

Short-term goal: Presentation

Daily goal: understand "Lay of the Land"

Plan:
#1: Open Source Conferences: what they use
#2: Open Source Conference Softwares

I intend to do this via brute force. Watch this space.

#0: contact the Zookeepr folk

The Story ...

I have an interest in conference management software after I had the good fortune of having been involved with organising several technical conference several years ago.

As part of my Master degree I'm participating in the course FOSSD: Free and Open Source Software Development (http://cs.anu.edu.au/student/comp8440/). I feel very privileged to be participating in this course.

In doing this course I feel as though I have the opportunity to research FOSS for conference the way that I always wanted to. I'm hoping to document this research here.