So I'm at GAUDEC this week. It's in Birmingham, which is handy as otherwise I wouldn't have attended. I'm a Gnome user and have been for many years, but I've never had any motivation to commit to any projects. There are plenty of cool people doing that already, and several of them are here this week too.
Part of my motivation was to see how another type of Open Source conference was organised and run, to see whether there was anything that YAPCs could learn from. So far I think it would have to be the other way around. I'll pick on some of those in my notes which I'll post some time next week.
Another part of the reason for attending was to see some cool talks and meet some cool people. I've already done some of that, and there are some celebrities here too. It's also been nice to put some faces to names. For example I finally discovered who Larry Ewing was. For those who aren't familiar with his name, he was the guy who created the original image of Tux.
We're 4/7ths of the way through the conference (it's 7 days long), with still plenty more to go. On the whole the talks and speakers have been interesting, but it's not my kind of conference. Had I been a Gnome hacker then I would have got much more from the event. Expect a more detailed report next week.
