Hi Everyone (Sorry for the delayed post as I am currently travelling overseas and wont be back to normal till early next month.)
As usual during the first weekend in February FOSDEM was held in Brussels and I wanted to to post a quick update. FOSDEM and rain. Rain and FOSDEM - they always seem to both go together but that doesnt stop thousands of people turning up to meet, discuss and learn about new open source technologies and ideas. Huge thanks to Martin van dem Bemt for being our FOSDEM swag storage warehouse and also to Daniel Gruno for co-ordinating ASF swag central. We had our banner, over booth cover and what seemed like millions of stickers. People would walk by do a double take and look again...then take a picture of all the stickers. Even with the stickers we had - we knew it wasnt them all. This year we were back on the first floor of K block right at the top of the stairs so everyone had to pass by us . so we got some great foot traffic. I got there at around 9am to find Martin, Daniel and Claude already there and getting things setup. As well as stickers we gave away some balloons for the children (and adults too), some fleece hats and bags left over from last year, some coffee thermos containers, feather and committer pins plus lots and lots of pens. It all disappeared! We had people from various projects take time on the booth - so thanks to Dan (Dahn :-) Hogland from cloudstack, Claude Warren from Jena, the Open Office team, as well as all the others who dropped by to say hello and spend some time talking to people. People always seem to be amazed at the number of projects and even without realising it that it is Apache Maven not just Maven, Apache Hadoop not just Hadoop, Apache Spark, not just Spark. This is one of the reasons that having a booth presence is great for outreach and general community building. We also had the D&I team spend some time on the booth talking to people about the ASF survey and encouraging people to go online and fill it out. For the last few years I have been involved with the Community Devroom but till now had never managed to see a community talk. That changed this year and I spent most of Sunday helping out in the Community Devroom and saw some amazing talks. At several points the room was completely full with a queue waiting outside the door. This shows that people are really keen to learn about and understand topics related to open source communities so I would encourage everyone to keep it on their radar for the next FOSDEM! While at FOSDEM I received several invitations for the ASF to have a booth at other open source events including FOSSASIA, OpenExpo Europe and an open source conference in Mauritius, so if you are interested in participating in any of these events then please let me know. I would really like to thank everyone that was involved in helping out to make the event a success. Looking forward to doing it all again next year if we get the chance. I'm happy to hear about any other FOSDEM experiences, feedback, thoughts, comments. Thanks Sharan --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@community.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@community.apache.org
