Utah Open Source Planet

Well, after staying up until around 4am hacking (2am with David and Cade), I finally finished my presentations slides and went to sleep for a measly 3hrs 45mins.  But that was enough to get me through the rest of the day.  And what a day it was!

When I arrived downstairs just after 8am, people were setting up for FAD NA.  Jeffrey Tadlock had arrived and was loading the food in from the car.  Bagels, donuts, fruit, coffee and orange juice.  Nice array of foodstuffs for the morning.

My presentation went pretty well, we had fun with it and I really enjoyed the gag about the Ambassador Class Starship.  Unfortunately, I forgot to grab the vga cable for my projector so we couldn’t use it but I did have pdfs of the slides online.

I brought up a lot of thoughts about how we should be ambassadors, how we should act and especially how important it is that we represent ourselves well to the community.  I talked a bit about the message we should spread and ways we can represent Fedora to the community.  I think it was well received by the ambassadors and I hope it made a good impression.

The rest of the day was very well focused, we made some serious progress in areas I wanted to see the progress as well as things I hadn’t even considered.  Pascal was gracious enough to take notes and place them online already.  I learned a ton about how FAmSCo works and what we need to do as ambassadors to make sure they will provide us with the tools we need to spread the word about Fedora.

After a good long day, we cleaned up (most of us anyway) around 2pm and started heading out, though my flight wasn’t until almost 8pm.  Brian Pepple, Jon Stanley and I headed to a coffee shop after dropping John Rose off at the airport and me shipping my projector and phone home.  It was a nice relaxing conversation.

UPDATE: Pictures are being uploaded as we speak to my flickr account

So I was running pretty crazy last night at the first night of UTOSC 2008, but I wasn’t that crazy.  Things went smoothly, I got most of the swag for the Fedora booth and enjoyed Paul’s talk.

As the organizer (among others), I tend to be running around a lot, but this year, I’ve already seen 3 presentations, which is pretty good.  I enjoyed the Drupal presentation, Mac Newbold’s Keynote and Paul Frields Fedora Keynote.

The registration booth was probably the biggest issue, but I’m happy about it now.  We need to be better at printing badges and I need to plan better regarding those sorts of things.

The Fedora and openSUSE booths were rocking, as were the Guru Labs, KnowledgeBlue and the Massage booth (yes, there’s massages here, aren’t you jealous?)

I’m excited to be in charge of a great group of volunteers this year.  And I think they’ve been the best thing for us this year.  Without them, we couldn’t take on all the great things we have and I’m confident they’ve been the difference between a smooth conference of 500+ people and us running crazy and not getting most things done.  THANK YOU VOLUNTEERS, WE LOVE YOU!

Lastly, between the two keynotes last night, Jayce Hall announced a $1000 challenge grant to the Serenity Foundation for the remainder of the conference.  That’s today and tomorrow.  As the Utah Open Source Foundation, we felt Phil Burns has been such a great motivator in the technology community, we wanted to give back.  So help us help Serenity and her foundation.  I was quite moved by Phil’s reaction, and was very happy we could help.

Looking forward to finishing off Day 2 and participating with all of you.  And thank you all for making UTOSC 2008 such a great success!!

So its soo close.  So very close, to the Utah Open Source Conference 2008.  Only, I have to write this paragraph about the conference itself and what it means to open source in Utah.  What it means to be involved in this amazing conference.

This blog post is supposed to be about something useful, but I think its just going to be a rambling session about all the things I think that are neat about open source, freedom, Utah and the benefits of holding UTOSC every year.

So what do I think, well… I think that UTOSC is my favorite thing I’ve ever done as a tech person.  I have an 8 year old boy, which is much of the reason I do this sort of thing.  He’s the reason I try to get webcams working with Ekiga, or try to record videos to send him with Cheese.  I love my boy, and I want him to be proud of his papa, and this is one way I can make a mark on society, to change the world if you will.

When I talk about changing the world, I don’t mean changing every aspect, but just doing something so simple that you love, to change the way others look at the thing and say, “wow!”.  That’s the thing I mean about changing the world.

I mean, geez, what do we have this year anyway?  Let’s see.  Oh, to start off with, a great theme ‘HOWTO’.  It really can’t get any better than that, can it!?  It points the way to learn how to do something in open source.  A contributor, a learning mechanism, a simple text document that started the whole thing.

We also have a great team of folks involved in making it happen this year.  I would be remiss if I didn’t thank them.  They’ve been instrumental in getting this to be the world class conference I hope it to become.  We’re not there yet, but give us a couple more years to learn all of those little tips and tricks.

Software, that’s another thing we have that’s great.  This coming year, I plan to take the UTOSC conference site and remake it again, this time with a better feature set.  I have to say, however, that the system we put into place more than 8 months ago, has turned out to be a great asset.  I thank those who’ve helped us make conman, our conference management software.  You know who you are, and I appreciate the help.

Because we’re running the conference and are also computer nerds/geeks/etc, we get to play with cool hardware, dink around with printing, do audio, video and invite families to participate in our wondrous extravaganza every year. But we also get to do something else that much cooler, we get to share our joys and passions with others.  Show others why open source is the way of the future.  Why its important to us and why we think that paying for software or having limted access to software is just wrong.

Learning is always part of a hobby.  This great, wonderful, exciting hobby of ours is so great we want to share the wealth with you all.

A couple things that I think are great about UTOSC 2008 are Family Day, I’m excited to set up the try-it lab on Friday night for the kiddies.  The fact that we’ll have booths for all three of the major Linux distributions (Fedora, OpenSUSE and Ubuntu). But there’s more.

On Thursday evening, Paul Frields will kick our conference into high gear with Fedora, first.  Friday comes and Joe Brockmeier will entertain us with some community talk.  And finally, on Saturday morning, we have Christer Edwards whose been instrumental in much of the Ubuntu community growth over the past couple years.

I’ve been influenced heavily by the Fedora Project.  And as an North American Ambassador, I’m also in charge of the Fedora booth.  We have a few volunteers and they’ve been great.  I anticipate the booth to be filled with people asking questions all three days.  One thing I wanted to mention, is that the booths/expo area is open to any/all that come through.  Spreading open source means allowing for the opportunity to use the software.  We want you all to come and listen to what our folks have to say.

Okay, so it sounds like my writers block really didn’t happen, but I wasn’t sure I could just sit down and crank out something this easily.  Off to write a simple 100 word intro to the Utah Open Source Conference.

Wish me luck!

Herlo

The Utah Open Source Foundation is hosting dinner for geeks, bloggers, and open source enthusiasts at Tucanos Brazillian Grill at the Gateway Center in downtown Salt Lake City on Friday, August 29, beginning at 8:30 p.m.

While this event is planned in conjunction with the 2008 Utah Open Source Conference going August 28-30, you do not need to be an attendee of UTOSC 2008 to come.

The Utah Open Source Foundation will be paying for appetizers for those who show up at Tucanos.

Tucanos is located on the south end of the Gateway Center, just above the California Pizza Kitchen. Directions to the Gateway Center can be found here.

About the Utah Open Source Conference 2008

The 2008 Utah Open Source Conference is the second annual gathering of open source enthusiasts in Utah. Following the amazingly successful first conference held in 2007 at Novell’s Open Source Technology Center in Provo, UT, this year’s conference is being held on the Redwood campus of Salt Lake Community College near Salt Lake City.

For more information about this conference, to register to attend, or to see a really neat website driven by open source software, go over to <http://2008.utosc.com/>.

How to register for the conference

UTOSC 2008 has chosen to utilize eventbrite as its registration system this year.  To register for the Utah Open Source Conference 2008, visit <http://utosc2008.eventbrite.com/> and sign up today.  We accept credit cards (through paypal) and payment at the door.  We’re looking forward to seeing you soon.

Its official!  For those of you who have always wanted to know how to hack a project together, this is a great opportunity.

We at the Utah Open Source Foundation learned a few weeks ago that Novell’s ‘Hack Week‘ will be occuring the same week as UTOSC 2008.  We also learned UTOSC 2008 will have these awesome hackers come out to the Salt Lake Community College Thursday and Friday to finish off some of their cool applications.  This is the third Hack Week from Novell.

On Saturday, we’re offering these hackers an opportunity to come down to UTOSC and give a few short presentations on what was finished and how they work.  Let’s hope they accept.

As an effort to help other community conferences in Utah and to help our overall technology Mecca, I’d like to invite anyone/everyone attending the Utah Open Source Conference 2008 to consider also attending the newly formed WordCamp Utah.

This one day event, held Saturday, September 27, 2008, is the latest project from our very own Joseph Scott, who will be presenting on WordPress Performance and Scalability at UTOSC 2008, has been hard at work planning and prepping for what will become the Inaugural WordCamp Utah.

If you are a Wordpress user as I am, it would be in your best interest to come down to the Open Source Technology Center at Novell and listen to such presenters as: Matt Mullenweg, Founder of Wordpress/Automattic, Alex King, wordpress developer and theme creator extraordinaire and many others.

We at the Utah Open Source Foundation have been working to help other local conferences succeed as well.  In the true nature of open source, competition makes everything better.  We look forward to your attendance at UTOSC 2008 and hope you will consider attending WordCamp Utah as well.

During UTOSC 2007, we opened our conference with an opening keynote dinner, featuring two great speakers, Matt Asay of Alfresco and Bruce Perens, well known free software advocate.  At these two keynote presentations, attendees were provided with great insight into the open source world, its technology and how great things can become greater with open source software and its communities.

In addition, there was a great buffet table full of food, well, because computer geeks like to eat!  And last but not least, the findlay quartet played for us, and they will be returning to entertain us with some classical music.

In 2008, we decided that the opening evening keynote dinner was a great idea.  We’re keeping the same format, and providing food and drink for all that attend.  This year will be more grand, UTOSC has secured the Oak Room at the Salt Lake Community College Student Center.  With comfortable table seating for approximately 300, and a podium and microphone for the presenters, UTOSC 2008 is sure to end its first full day of presentations with great keynotes from Mac Newbold (Code Greene) and Paul Frields (Fedora Project/Red Hat).

The full schedule of speakers and events is being finalized right now, and we anticipate a final version very soon.  In the meantime, we have the list of presenters, along with times and dates available on our website, <http://2008.utosc.com/speaker/list/>

About this conference thing

The 2008 Utah Open Source Conference is the second annual gathering of open source enthusiasts in Utah. Following the amazingly successful first conference held in 2007 at Novell’s Open Source Technology Center in Provo, UT, this year’s conference is being held on the Redwood campus of Salt Lake Community College near Salt Lake City.

For more information about this conference, to register to attend, or to see a really neat website driven by open source software, go over to <http://2008.utosc.com/>.

How to register for the conference

UTOSC 2008 has chosen to utilize eventbrite as its registration system this year.  To register for the Utah Open Source Conference 2008, visit <http://utosc2008.eventbrite.com/> and sign up today.  We accept credit cards (through paypal) and payment at the door.  We’re looking forward to seeing you soon.

For those of you who are in the know in the local technology scene, you know that Utah has a lot of good choices when it comes to successful small businesses.  Today, we announce one of our local small business leaders who’s accomplished a great deal and helped the community as well.

Mac Newbold - Code Greene (Chief Technical Officer & Partner)

Mac has Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Computer Science from the University of Utah. He began intense involvement in web development in 2001 and has been an avid member of the Utah PHP User group (UPHPU) since 2004. In 2005, Mac co-founded Code Greene, a web development company, which has now grown to 10 team members. Code Greene develops using almost exclusively open source software and platforms. Code Greene helps clients make money by helping them streamline their businesses with intelligent dynamic websites and business process automation.

Keynote Title: How To Leverage Open Source in a For-Profit Business

Lessons learned by helping hundreds of companies develop an online presence and automate their businesses by using open source software and development platforms.

Mac will be warming up the crowd for the Paul Frields keynote on Thursday, August 28, 2008.  He will begin at 6:30pm at the UTOSC Keynote Dinner.

About this conference thing

The 2008 Utah Open Source Conference is the second annual gathering of open source enthusiasts in Utah. Following the amazingly successful first conference held in 2007 at Novell’s Open Source Technology Center in Provo, UT, this year’s conference is being held on the Redwood campus of Salt Lake Community College near Salt Lake City.

For more information about this conference, to register to attend, or to see a really neat website driven by open source software, go over to <http://2008.utosc.com/>.

How to register for the conference

UTOSC 2008 has chosen to utilize eventbrite as its registration system this year.  To register for the Utah Open Source Conference 2008, visit <http://utosc2008.eventbrite.com/> and sign up today.  We accept credit cards (through paypal) and payment at the door.  We’re looking forward to seeing you soon.

Its the last day for early bird registration for UTOSC,  <http://2008.utosc.com>.  After today, prices go up to $100 ($50 w/LUG discounts).

Register with eventbrite today!  <http://utosc2008.eventbrite.com>

See you all there!

I’ve been very busy this last two weeks updating pages and working on finalizing details for UTOSC 2008, held August 28-30, 2008.  For instance, the Fedora booth is coming along nicely.  For a conference of around 400, we should have a pretty good booth turnout.  I had Jeffrey Tadlock, Paul Frields (who’s also keynoting btw) and its possible other NA Ambassadors may attend.  I’m really excited about this development.

In addition, Joe Brockmeier of OpenSUSE will also be keynoting and we’ve got quite a list of presenters on our website.  Our goal is to help open source grow in Utah, and by providing this conference once a year, we can help our local LUGs and open source leaders.  We have approximately 50 presentations, plus events and other fun stuff up our sleeve over this 3 day conference.

One of the great events returning this year is the Guru Labs Troubleshooting Challenge.  We hope to have this event bigger and better this year, with cash prizes for the winner(s).  There will be sign-ups available on Thursday morning at the registration booth and the contest will run all day Friday, crowning a winner Friday night!

Another great return from last year is KnowledgeBlue.  With opensourceTV, they’ll be recording the video for several of our presentations and keynotes.  They’ll be working just like last year (only better) to provide interviews as well with some of the leaders of the open source community.  We expect you all will enjoy the videos as they go up on youtube.  This year, they will focus on multiple angles and getting a good quality presentation from the presenters.

Lastly, I’d like to talk a little bit about Family Day at UTOSC, August 30, 2008.  If you take a look at the presentations on Saturday, you’ll notice a bit of a trend.  With a few exceptions, presentations are intended to help the family. Also, we are working on activities for the kiddies such as an OLPC, videos on MythTV, edubuntu, Fedora Electronics Lab demos and more in our try-it lab.  We’re also working to acquire a moon bounce and sumo suits (for the big kids).  Saturday looks to be a ton of fun.

NOTE: This doesn’t mean that we have enough family stuff, and in fact, we really don’t.  One thing I’d like to see, is a presentation on content filtering for the family.  Something like “Howto use Dan’s Guardian effectively” or a discussion of pfsense, smoothwall or other firewalling/filtering tools.  If you have a presentation you’d like to suggest in this area, please let me know by commenting or emailing me.

I hope to see many of you there as the cost is quite low at $70 and if you are LUG member, its only $35 until August 7 for the early bird pricing.  Read more on our website at http://2008.utosc.com or register directly with eventbrite at http://utosc2008.eventbrite.com.

See you all there.

Herlo

Well, its been more than two weeks since my last post about FUDCon.  I figure its high time I posted something about what’s been going on in my neck of the woods.  Things have been quite busy and are bound to continue at this phrenetic pace for a bit longer.

DarkIce - Audio Streaming

I’ve been working this past week on getting darkice packaged for Fedora.  Darkice is a front end audio recording tool for streaming servers like Icecast.  I much prefer it over ices and any other streaming client I’ve tried.  It does have bits for mp3/mp2/faac as well as ogg/vorbis, so I’ll be packaging it for only the latter.

It seems rpmbuild is a bit more cryptic from my last foray into building RPMs and I have to hunt a little harder for the libs and the binaries.  Its coming along nicely, now that I have my virtual machine back in place.  I’m also hoping that darkice will be easy to integrate into Fedora Talk as I’ve never dealt with the asterisk end before.

Utah Open Source Conference

This past weekend, we spent a good bit of time reviewing and selecting presentations for the Utah Open Source Conference.  I am the head organizer and founder of this all volunteer conference. In fact, our very own FPL, Paul Frields will be keynoting on Thursday evening.  Keep an eye on this blog for future updates about the conference.

A New Interest

I’ve recently started to see someone of the female persuasion.  Many of my friends have met her, and I’m guessing they like her as I do (well, not quite as much).  Here’s hoping things go well with Jennifer

There’s more here, and I’ll try to be more vocal about it as I think its good to share.

Cheers,

Herlo

One of the major projects that I have been working on for the last year or so has been the Utah Open Source Foundation and their annual conference.  I’m incharge of sponsorships and marketing, so if you are interested in sponsoring or helping us market the conference better… Please let me know!

Yesterday Jayce, one of the guys in our group, was interviewed on couchcast.org.  It was really good, so if you missed it you are lucky they have a stream up that you can listen too.  Plus, I think there is a discount code that was announced there.

A direct link to the article and stream: Utah Open Source Conference Preview - Jayce Hall of UTOS - Jul 07, 2008

Last week, we announced that Jayce^ Hall will be on couchcast.org.  Well that day is today, so come and listen to him and the couchcast crew as they discuss who will be at the Utah Open Source Conference 2008.

Here’s the details again just in case you missed them the first time:

When: July 7, 2008 12pm MDT (Today)
Where: http://couchcast.org

See you all there!

UTOSC 2008 abstract submission has ended.  And while that part of the process is over, we now have the task of selecting presenters.  For those of you who have submitted presentations, or those in the community we’ve contacted, feel free to vote for your favorites in our digg style voting system.

As mentioned before, login and click on the “SPEAKERS” link at the UTOSC 2008 website.  Vote for or against the presentations (or don’t vote for a presentation at all).  But hurry, because voting privileges are only good until July 10, 2008.

On July 15, 2008, a tentative presentation schedule will be delivered.  In addition, because UTOSC 2008 has more presenters than we can possibly take, many presenters will be asked to be alternates. This selection date should give you almost 45 days to prepare your presentation.

Don’t forget, registration is open as well, visit http://2008.utosc.com/ to register today.  If you haven’t already, contact your Local User Group for discount codes today.

We hope to see you all at Utah Open Source Conference 2008.

Cheers,

Clint

For those of you who’ve been considering submitting a presentation for the Utah Open Source Conference, its not yet too late!  But you only have until July 1 (that’s Tomorrow) to submit your presentation.

The selection committee is currently voting on presentations and will be doing so until July 10.   In addition, we’re going to be extending an invitation to any and all potential speakers to help us select the best presentations for our conference.  As a potential speaker, just click on the “SPEAKERS” link at the UTOSC 2008 website and start voting for your favorite presentations starting July 1.  But hurry, because voting privileges are only good until July 10, 2008.

On July 15, 2008, we’ll announce which presentation have been selected, along with a tentative time and date for each.  In addition, because UTOSC 2008 has more presenters than we can possibly take, many presenters will be asked to be alternates. This selection date should give you almost 45 days to prepare your presentation.

Either way, we’ll be having a great conference and we look forward seeing everyone at the Utah Open Source Conference 2008.

Cheers,

Clint

Hey everybody!

Guess what!  The Utah Open Source Foundation’s very own Jason Hall (Jayce^ [the face]) will be discussing the Utah Open Source Conference with Robert Merrill et al, on CouchCast.

CouchCast is a local show with topics around technology and business.  Its a call-in show, so be sure to get on the line in advance and ask questions.  Feel free to dial in around noon, 347-324-3797 and ask pretty much anything you like.

Discussions will include keynote announcements, presentations, family day, the Utah Open Source Awards, the troubleshooting challenge (last years big hit) and many other aspects of the conference at the end of August.

Jayce will also be discussing the Utah Open Source Foundation, its purpose, goals and plans for 2009.  Things like live streaming of Local User Group meetings, podcasts and other events to make it easier to spread the word about open source in Utah.

Feel free to check it out, here’s how:

When: July 7, 2008 12pm MDT
Where: http://couchcast.org (yes, its flash, sorry) –> hosted by blogtalkradio.

Enjoy the show!

Hi all,

Its been a few days since we blogged about the Utah Open Source Conference 2008 (in fact, more like 2+ weeks).  But I’m back now and ready to let you guys know that while there might be a few more bumps in our migration path, most of the Utah Open Source servers are up and working well.

We have been busy lately, preparing for an exciting and fun Utah Open Source Conference 2008.  New features continue to crop up on our main site.  Check them out and start watching for speakers as we’ll be approving presentations over the next few weeks.  The selection committee, made up of many professional geeks, LUG leaders and others, has been madly voting for their favorites so it looks to be a good list of presentations.

As of right now, UTOSC 2008 will begin in approximately 63 days.  And due to this, I’ve taken the time to create a little javascript that can be included in your site, with a neat countdown.  Have a look at the right hand side of our site.

We’d like to invite everyone to put this link on their website to help us get more people interested in the countdown.  Basically, this is a very similar countdown script to the ones released by each of the big Linuxes (Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSUSE).

Just stick this code anywhere on your site:

<script id=“utosc-banner”
type=“text/javascript”
src=“http://dl.utosc.com/08/scripts/release-counter-ext.js”>
</script>

You should get something similar to this:

See you all at the Utah Open Source Conference 2008!

Cheers,

Clint

The 2008 Utah Open Source Conference is coming up fast, as you know. If you would like to present on a topic at the conference, there’s no time like NOW to whip up a response to the Call For Papers  (if you have not already).

You only have until June 1 to get that paper turned in. You can submit your proposed topic by going to the 2008 Utah Open Source Conference website and clicking on the Call For Papers link.

If you’re not sure where to begin, check out our previous blog post about the Call For Papers.

Not only is 2008 the second year we will be holding the Utah Open Source Conference, it is also the second year we will be recognizing and awarding four remarkable individuals as part of the Utah Open Source Awards ceremony at the conference.

The Utah Open Source Awards will be given in four categories:

• Business
• Community
• Technology
• Education

In 2007, awards were given in three categories as the Education category was not added until this year. The recipients of the 2007 Utah Open Source Awards were:

• Matt Asay of Alfresco (Business) for his work evangelizing open source software in business
• Brandon Beattie (Technology) for his excellent contributions to the MythTV project
• Christer Edwards (Community) for his leadership in the Ubuntu Utah project

Now is the time for you to close your eyes and search deep in the crevices of your mind of who within the local community has made a positive impact on your experience using open source software. It could be someone who writes helpful documentation or blog posts. Perhaps you know someone who has developed valuable open source software. Maybe it’s someone who has made a difference in encouraging adoption and understanding of open source software. Whoever it is, concentrate on them. Now, imagine them receiving a big round of applause and a cool gift as thanks from the community. Okay, open your eyes.

When you have thought of at least one person, send a quick e-mail message to awards@utos.org with the name and a brief explanation of why you think this person is deserving of a Utah Open Source Award. There’s no limit to how many people you can nominate, but you can only submit nominations until August 1.

Winners will be announced (and awarded) during the 2008 Utah Open Source Conference held August 28-30, 2008 at the Salt Lake Community College Redwood Campus.

Mailing lists can be a pain in the butt, especially when discussions spiral into topics about which pizza delivery company is best, which text editor is best, which Linux distribution is best, which caffeinated beverage is best, etc.

We at Utah Open Source (UTOS) know you work hard day in and day out and deserve a break from the hardship of having to deal with meaningless discussions about what’s best. We give you something better — perhaps the best mailing list ever: utos-announce. We created this list so we can mail out announcements about upcoming UTOS events, but you can use it too, to announce anything you’ve got coming up… well, as long as it has something to do with open source in Utah.

Subscribing to the utos-announce list is simple: Go to < http://utos.org/mailman/listinfo/utos-announce >, enter your e-mail address, your name (optional), a password (also optional), and select the Subscribe button. If you’ve followed these instructions so far without making any mistakes or being distracted by a flamewar continuing on one of the other mailing lists you’re subscribed to, a confirmation message will be sent to your e-mail address with instructions on how to confirm your subscription. Follow those instructions (They’re real, real simple… like “click on this” simple.) and you’ll be ready to receive amazing, exciting announcements!

Subscribing to the utos-announce list is a great way to stay informed about the latest developments of the upcoming UTOSC conference. Find out who the keynote speakers will be before the story is aired on the local evening news. Learn what exciting schwag and promotions conference sponsors will be offering in their booths. Get the low-down on entertainment options while you’re attending the Utah Open Source Conference. Ahhh… the possibilities are endless.

What? You’re still here? Go subscribe already!

Before there can be another Utah Open Source Conference in 2008, there needs to be a list of people who will present on various topics. This is how YOU can contribute to the conference: by being a presenter!

The UTOSC Call For Papers begins now at <http://2008.utosc.com/>! Papers can be submitted until June 1, after which time chosen presenters will be announced.

Some people are natural public speakers and presenters while others are reluctant to imagine themselves in front of a group of people at a conference. Because this year’s Utah Open Source Conference theme is “HOWTO”, nobody should feel unqualified or inexperienced to present. We want presenters who can share information at all levels.

And now, some tough questions.

What should I talk about?

You should talk about Open Source software, philosophy, technology, etc. The theme for this year’s conference is “HOWTO” so your topic can be targeted at beginners, experts, or someone in between.

It may help to see what topics were presented last year. Go to <http://www.utosc.com/2007/sessions/> for information about 2007’s conference sessions.

This year, several sessions will be targetted at beginning or “newbie” users including those who are family members of an Open Source geek. Basic sessions on using OpenOffice.org, GIMP, or K3B are good examples of these types of sessions.

We are asking for presentations in one of the following categories, so bear that in mind also:

• Business
• Technical
• Community
• Education

What does a response to a call for papers look like?

You should come up with a brief outline, or abstract, of your presentation and who would be interested. You should also provide some information about you, your experience with open source software and the specific aspects you’re proposing to speak about.

Here’s an example of an abstract:

Title: Open source home security

This presentation will outline how I have used a
Linux server, IP cameras, and open source software,
to provide around-the-clock video and image
surveilance of my home which is archived for later
viewing and is available for viewing via the Web
when I’m not at home. 

The presentation will describe how to set up a
system similar to mine and what alternatives are
available for software and hardware in the system.

What’s in it for me?

There are lots of perks reserved for people chosen to present at the Utah Open Source Conference!

Resumé material

Having presented on a topic at a conference is a great thing to add to your resumé and could make the difference the next time you apply for a job.

Free admission

If you’re chosen as a speaker, we’ll let you — and your family — into the conference for FREE!

A picture and a paragraph

Speakers are asked to submit a digital photo and a paragraph of biographical information which will be seen by those viewing the UTOSC website and those reading the conference program.

Warm fuzzies

Being involved in the Utah Open Source Conference is a great experience. Just ask anyone who was involved in 2007’s conference.

What’s that URL again?

Go to <http://2008.utosc.com/> and get yourself an account. Then you can submit as many presentation ideas as you like.

Tomorrow night, 7pm, in Murray at my house, we’ll be eating pizza and hacking on ConMan again.

If you are interested in joining the fun, please feel free to stop by and learn some kick-a** django skillz.

The last two HackNights were all-nighters and were very successful.  Tomorrow’s HackNight is to refactor the views a little and build out the blog portion of the app as well.  Feel free to come by and stay as long or as little as you like.

See you all there.

Cheers,

Clint

The 2008 Utah Open Source Conference, to be held at Salt Lake Community College’s Redwood Campus August 28-30, 2008, will be a great opportunity for open source enthusiasts to gather, socialize, learn, and exchange ideas. In these ways, the 2008 UTOSC won’t be a lot different than the 2007 UTOSC. However, the planning and organizing team behind UTOSC 2008 does have some new and exciting changes for the 2008 conference.

In our previous blog posting, we described the theme the 2008 UTOSC is designed around: HOWTO. In this article, we’ll explain some of the ways we’re planning to abide by this theme.

Friends and Family

The 2008 UTOSC is designed to be more friendly to “newbies,” people who have only had a limited amount of exposure to the open source world, and to family members of those who eat, drink, sleep and roll around in open source every moment of their geeky lives.

Conference sessions on Friday, August 29, will include sessions targeted at those just getting their feet wet. Topics may include “Installing Linux,” “Using OpenOffice.org,” “Introduction to open source social networking tools,” and “Understanding SSH.”

The planning and organizing committee is excited about getting family members involved in what would ordinarily be considered fairly exclusive to geeks. There will be plenty of activities and conference sessions Saturday, August 30 targeting children and significant others so they can learn how open source may benefit them. We’ll have games and educational software for the kids like SuperTuxCart, SuperTux, Planet Penguin Racer, Gcompris, and KDEEDU. Session topics may include “Open source digital scrapbooking,” “Open source for the musician and music enthusiast,” “Open source and family history,” and “Open source artistry.” Great fun for the entire family!

To make this happen, admission on Saturday will be free to those who attend with a registered conference attendee.

Bar what?

Earlier this year, Utah Open Source Foundation (UTOSF) Head Cheese, Clint Savage, attended FUDCon, a conference for users and developers of the Fedora Linux distribution. One of the days of this conference was set up as a BarCamp, where attendees meet at the beginning of the day and decide, as a group, what conference topics and activities will take place that day. The BarCamp process is fairly informal, but there is one rule: Every attendee has to participate either by presenting or facilitating in at least one session.

Clint was totally amazed by this process and said it was one of the most satisfying conference experiences he’s had. He vowed that the 2008 Utah Open Source Conference would include one day of BarCamp. As a result, Thursday, August 28, the first day of the conference, will be held BarCamp-style. Be sure to show up early so you can participate in the entire process.

What now?

We’ll be posting more information in the days and weeks to come with more information about UTOSC 2008 including a Call For Papers and a Call For Volunteers. If you haven’t already, start thinking of topics you could present at this year’s conference with the above information in mind. Because this conference caters to a very diverse audience of varying levels of experience using open source or even using computers, nobody should feel they don’t have something to contribute.

For those of you waiting with bated breath, wait no longer. The Utah Open Source Conference volunteers have been hard at work year preparing an even more awesome conference for 2008.

Because 2007 was such a grand success, we’ve made some minor changes and improvements to help with a smoother conference. This year’s conference is at a different location and we’ve added a full day on Thursday.

The Utah Open Source Conference 2008 will be held at the Salt Lake Community College, Redwood Road campus August 28 - 30, 2008.

This years theme is HOWTO. The concept is that within the technology, education, community and business tracks, there will be plenty to talk about.

• HOWTOs will help others get started
• HOWTOs will help families use open source together
• HOWTOs will provide a stepping stone along the road to technology mastery
• HOWTOs will let those that are masters get together and make the products better.

These are just a few of the many things that HOWTO theme will accomplish during the Utah Open Source Conference (UTOSC) 2008.

The Salt Lake Community College Computer Science department is excited to be a sponsor of the 2008 conference and will be using it to improve students’ awareness and understanding of open source software.

The Utah Open Source Foundation is also re-dedicating itself to ensure the pricing structure remains reasonable for those who’d like to come and are on a budget. The pricing structure right now is tentative, but no major increases in the fees are planned for attendees.

We currently have a tentative plan on our wiki, so feel free to have a look. If you have suggestions, please join the chat anytime in the #utos channel on irc.freenode.net or email clints at utos dot org with your comments.

Watch closely over the next week for the Call for Papers, updates on the basic schedule, and the Call for Volunteers among other exciting announcements, including our keynote speakers.

See you all in August.

Clint Savage
Founder, Utah Open Source Foundation

The UTOS Confrence Manager or ConMan, is really coming along.  Tonight’s HackNight didn’t last quite as long as last weekend, but there was some definite improvements.

One of the really nice improvements was the addition of the logo by James Hancock who’s really good with his inkscape skills.  Other improvements included a better gui, backend administration, refactoring much of the user creation to better accommodate future enhancements.

One of the best features that has been added tonight was the blog functionality by Kevin Kubasik of GNOME fame.  When a conference is upcoming and during the conference itself, this feature will be front and center.  Nice work!

Things that are left include registration, including payments with google checkout, paypal or a merchant backend.  Sponsor management is another, as well as schedules for volunteers, speakers, attendees and sessions, bofs and events.

I’m even sure there are items not yet considered above, but that’s the functionality we hope to have in place within the next few months.   Feel free to download the project, and submit patches back to us anytime, we dig the help.

We’re looking forward to deploying the Call for Papers components tomorrow or Sunday in our official call for papers announcement, so keep your eyes peeled.

Cheers,

Clint

A special thanks to Guru Labs, Kevin Kubasik, John Weis, James Hancock, Will Smith and Trevor Sharpe for sticking it out much of Saturday night and into the wee hours of Sunday night.

The chinese food arrived at around 9pm, and we sat around talking design and ideas for the next 30 minutes, and about 11pm we really started digging into the project.

After about 12-13 hours of good coding, and time troubleshooting, learning, drinking loads of caffeine and a bunch of other good stuff, I’m proud to announce the first real progress on the ConMan project from UTOSF.

The general idea is to improve upon otherwise incomplete or sucky open source conferencing systems. ConMan (Conference Manager) is seeming to become quite good, with some good coding from Kevin Kubasik, good web design by John and some good perserverence as well by yours truly. Most of the group crashed out somewhere between 2am and 8am, Kevin and I however, continued to hack until we had something semi-solid at around 11:30am.

It was a great time had by all and a good framework has been built. Django seems like the perfect solution for this and we will even have CAPTCHA and email confirmation early in the 0.0.2 release.

For now though, if you are interested in seeing the Call for Papers, Call for Volunteers and Contact applications, please feel free to download it at http://code.google.com/p/utos-conman. We look forward to bug reports (which you can also make at the google code site, you just need a google account) and fixes in the future. Also any recommendations that are made will be taken into consideration.

In addition, keep an eye out for the “Call for Papers” to appear at http://2008.utosc.com very soon.

Cheers,

Clint Savage

Hi all,

The Utah Open Source Conference 2007 was such a success. We’ve been busily recovering from all the work and joy we had and are ready to kick it into high gear for this year’s upcoming conference. As far as dates go, we’re looking in the same time frame (Late August, Early September 2008).

But there’s a larger question looming right now and we’d like your input on it. The question is:

Who would you like to come and keynote Utah Open Source Conference 2008?

We’ve thought of a few for you, but would like to have you submit names to us here on our blog. A poll has been created with a few obvious choices, and we’ll do what we can to get the winner here (if its not too cost prohibitive). So without further adieu, vote to your hearts content: