Open Source Weekend – conference report

Open Source Weekend – conference report

The first Open Source Weekend conference was a great event.
Our group started to arrive just after 9am, and I think we were all gone by about 5:30pm.
We were located on the mezzanine floor, and despite a power failure during the middle of
some installs, we managed rather well with our very good high traffic location.

Our group consisted of:

• Robert Bernier
• Jeff Breker
• Diane Bruce
• Trevor Curtis
• Jeremy Faulkner
• Dan Langille
• Dru Lavigne
• David Maxwell
• Pat Wendorf

My thanks to those that came to help. We had helpers come from Kingston (200km) and Sudbury (500km) to be at the event.
We had boxes running FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and even a Mac OS/X box.
We gave away over 250 copies of FreeBSD which FreeBSD Mall
donated to our event. The remaining 50 4-CD sets will be donated to the Ottawa Public Library.

FreeBSD Mall also gave us FreeBSD stickers, pins, and horns (which were very highly sought
after; even Tux wanted to wear them).

There were two days to this event. The first day was similar to a trade show convention
and that’s where we were. I was also involved in the second day, which featured a demonstration
network. If you look through the picture below, you’ll find that the IKEA
rack is shown many times. I had one guy tell me that he’d gone out and bought one after reading
about it on this website. It suited his needs. And it performed well for this event, on both days.

Pictures

There are two collections of photographs that I know of:

• Day 1 by Jeremy Faulkner
• Day 1 by Vic Gedris
• Day 2 by Vic Gedris

Here are some of my favourites from the above selection:

• Before
• After
• Me explaining the finer points of an install
• The booth at a quieter time
• Tux wears horns!
• PostgreSQL wears horns!
• The rack goes up at BOSS

Feedback

I’ve had feedback from one of the commercial companies involved with the event. They were happy
with the results and thought the attendance was good especially considering this was the first
Open Source Weekend. I have no doubts that next year we will have more displays not to mention
more people. Big events have small beginnings. OSW is now part of the annual conference scene.