Today was the first day of FOSSCamp, the Un-conference in Boston. The idea behind an Un-conference is that there is no schedule posted before the event. Instead during the event participants post things they are interested in talking about on a board. Here at Hotel@MIT, rooms were set out with power points (for laptops), drinks and sweets to keep us going. In the main hall where the schedule was maintained we had drinks and snacks on-tap all day.
We got together in the main room where the event was kicked off by Mark Shuttleworth and Jono Bacon. They went through the plan for the day and pretty soon we were off and running, proposing topics and planning our day.
I started off by attending a session scheduled by Corey Burger where we discussed the Fridge (an Ubuntu news website). In that session we talked about issues that the fridge has – lack of editors and content, lack of coherent submission system/policy and ways in which we could improve or resolve these. We had a lot of great input – especially from people test-driving the site during the session. I think we have some great ideas to improve the Fridge in both look & feel and function.
Next was a great session about suspend and resume by Matthew Garrett. He explained at the start that the whole point of the session was to reduce the number of people who would ask him questions about suspend after he told all of us about it en-masse. He covered the technical aspects of how a system goes into a suspended state, how resume works and how it all goes wrong, and ways in which we can work around and improve some of the issues in the area. Notes were taken and I understand this information will be published on the wiki so others have a better understanding of suspend and resume.
Jono Bacon hosted a session about “Community, community, community” where we discussed ways in which various open source communities can work better together. In a very open and cordial discussion, people from differing projects (GNOME & KDE for example) and distros (RedHat, Farsight, Ubuntu) outlined some of the issues that face them and how they can possibly improve them with better communication with competitors. Some interesting suggestions around launchpad translation system and cross-distro communication to and from upstream projects were had.
I ran a session about screencasting (unsurprisingly) where I outlined some of the issues that the Ubuntu Screencast Team (and indeed any screencaster on Linux) faces. We discussed the process of creating high quality screencasts and places where that could be improved. We also discussed the need for a unified screencasting application on Linux which would record both audio and video but also provide playback, simple editing, titling and other features usually found in many disparate applications. I came away feeling more confident that what I was after wasn’t impossible to develop, but that it needed a well defined specification, which I will work on.
During a discussion of the OLPC I had a play with an Intel Classmate PC running Edubuntu. It boots off built in flash memory and ran surprisingly quickly once it booted. The screen was clear and the keyboard – whilst small (designed for small hands – children 
) was quite usable. I surfed using the built-in wifi for a bit before the battery died and I gave it back.
During the DRU – Disc Remastering Utility session I learned how Dell employees crafted DRU to enable them to create custom live Ubuntu install CD images. These are tailored to specific models of machine, able to detect through “smbios” calls the exact model of machine which affects the rest of the boot up and subsequent installation process. It looks like a cool utility, which could be useful for other OEMs, system integrators or anyone deploying Ubuntu to a large number of different devices.
Scott James-Remnant ran a very busy session about upstart, the event-based replacement for the sysv init system usually used under Linux during startup. I’ll be honest, the vast majority of what was discussed went way over my head, but the bits I did get were interesting nonetheless.
The final topic of the day I sat in on was Chandler, a cross-platform open-source client & server Personal Information Manager. I’ve already seen a demo of it in a Robert Scoble interview, but it was nice to hear about the project, architecture and see a live demo in person. I’ll be keeping an eye on that project and will probably install it myself when I get a chance.
Now I think I’ll go and find somewhere to get some food.
