On Saturday I attended the Central Pennsylvania Open Source Conference 2009 as a table sponsor (for Ubuntu Pennsylvania) and a speaker.
We arrived at CPOSC around 8AM to meet up with Jonathan and Crissi Simpson who had also come up from Philly the evening before, and to finally meet Bret Fledderjohn!
Bret did an amazing job with the table, bringing along a demo machine running Kubuntu, a the tri fold foam board to display various Ubuntu-things on and tweaked slides from the Ubuntu Colorado Team for rotation on a computer at the table (ended up on my mini9) giving information about Ubuntu. I added a few things to the table as well, rounding things off nicely at our table for the day. Other tables looked great too, there were some local Fedora Ambassadors, I was able to have a nice chat with the CEO of Anteil and got to kick back a bit with the Zenoss guys (photographic proof!).
Slides from my talk on Contributing to Open Source can be found here. The talk itself went very well, except for being a bit short partially due to my inability to do the demo I had prepared because I lacked internet access in that room (I did preload some pages, but the actual demo I had was interactive). I was able to answer a number of questions from the audience in the free time I had and after the core of my talk and I was approached directly afterwards by several people discussing more questions and ideas about contributing, my slides should be expanded! And how I could I forget volunteer sysadmining in my slides? That’s one of the things I do! It’s ashame my talk was so late in the day (last time slot), I fear I cut some conversations short due to the need to head back to the table and pack up and then head out.
Afterwards a bunch of us headed out to Appalachian Brewing Company for some after conference chatting, food and beer. Great day, thanks to everyone who helped out at our table, and to all the conference organizers for making it such a success. And also big Thank You to my boyfriend for flying out to San Francisco to support me at my first conference speaking engagement, his support and later constructive criticism of my presentation was awesome :)
I’ve uploaded more photos to the Ubuntu Pennsylvania Gallery (direct link here) and I also put some up on flickr to join all the other cposc tagged photos on flicker.
Unrelated, I discovered this morning that along with Sebastian Kügler, my interview primarily covering my involvement in Ubuntu Women for the Pardus-Linux E-Zine conducted by Hüseyin Sarıgül back in August had been published. If you speak Turkish (or if you’re curious!) you can check it out here.
Wednesday, Oct 21st, 2009 at 18:19
Great event!
You look nervous on the podium Pleia…. still, I would be so nervous You would only see my hands as I turned the notes…
Looks like they put on some good snacks as well.
Wednesday, Oct 21st, 2009 at 18:21
I’m always nervous when I give presentations, this was my first actual conference talk (previously I just spoke at LUGs and impromptu things for my LoCo team). But practice is helping a lot, I still have my moments but it’s getting better :)
Friday, Oct 23rd, 2009 at 8:38
You can find English version of the interview here :
http://www.pardus-edergi.org/files/sayi-13/interview_elizabeth.pdf
Friday, Oct 23rd, 2009 at 8:58
Oh great, thanks Erdem!