FOSDEM 2006 Redux
First off, FOSDEM 2006 was awesome. Thanks to all people that made
this happen. As last year, 
Edwin, 
christ and I went to Brussels to run the Jabber booth and developers'
room.
This year, I managed to do three presentations. The first was an
introduction into the world of Jabber, which I co-presented with
Boris. That was great
fun and we seem to make a good team. There were a lot of people
attending, too. The second presentation was about publish-subscribe
and was also well-received. Then on Sunday I held a session on
What's new and cool
. The room was so packed that many
were standing and I got reports of people not being able to attend
because they could not get in. In those talks I
touched on various developments in our community. Examples include
Google Talk, Jingle, Extended Presence and much,
much more.
Finally, a fourth presentation was an ad-hoc one by Raphael Langerhorst. He talked about the G System, a distributed virtual reality simulation that depends on Jabber for all communication between entities. Very interesting stuff, and I'm glad he could present this at short notice when another presentation got cancelled. Raphael, thanks!
Reflecting on FOSDEM, Boris has written two interesting pieces on his blog. The first is about Jabber at FOSDEM 2006. Be sure to check out his picture of how he couldn't get into the third presentation. Further, I agree that we need more actual current Jabber developers on events like this. Jabber is picking up speed fast, and people want to hear and see more. Also, I think it would be great to have some face-to-face discussions between developers.
Boris touches on what it takes to become a member of the JSF. Well, I think he qualifies for his recent lobbying and presenting stuff. We do not only need people building stuff, but also people that can extract the benefits of using Jabber for a range of purposes and make projects and companies aware of those.
In his second piece, Boris talks about FOSDEM attendees and European hacker culture, along with some feedback on the FOSDEM organisation this year. A good read. But please Boris, make it visually apparent on your front page and in your feed that some entries have more text than what is included in those. I almost missed more than half of your good stuff.
Besides preparing and giving presentations, running the booth, and even assure a few people by signing their CACert forms, I didn't have much time left on the ULB grounds myself. Organising all this stuff is tiring and I'm not going to do three presentations in one weekend again.
Fortunately, we did have time to join Boris for food and drinks on both Saturday and Sunday evening, along with a bunch of the great Drupal people that I met at BarCamp Amsterdam. I even got a, way too large, Drupal T-shirt. I talked to Ivan a few times on the potential of Jabber in large information processing systems and more. Very inspiring. Boris also threw Identity in the mix. These out-of-band sessions are always too short. Therefore, I strongly support the idea of BarCamp Brussels around the Euro OSCON 2006 event that I hope to be attending and give a presentation at. More on that later.