[PLUG] Awesome OSCON

John Jason Jordan johnxj at comcast.net
Sat Jul 24 05:46:29 UTC 2010


I spent Wednesday and Thursday manning the PLUG booth at OSCON, and
had a wonderful, exhilarating and fulfilling experience.

First, some really good news. According to a story in the Thursday
Oregonian, O'Reilly has committed to hold OSCON in Portland through
2013. As those who follow such things know, OSCON was always held in
Portland, but last year O'Reilly moved it to San Jose. It was sorely
missed by those of us in the Portland area open source community. But
apparently O'Reilly has realized where they are appreciated. I should
also add that O'Reilly makes money from book sales (even more these
days from e-book sales), but also makes money from conventions. We
are more profitable than San Jose! Yay for us!

Although it was the most last-minute of last-minute enterprises, we
pulled off the PLUG booth, and none of the Exhibit Hall participants
realized we barely made it. 

Lots of PLUGGERs stopped by, and it was fun to see the familiar faces.
But some were unfamiliar, having not participated in a while. Hopefully
they will get back with us.

We also had visitors from other PLUGs - Philadelphia and Phoenix,
specifically. Lots of hilarity as we compared notes about how many
PLUGs there are.

We also had a lot of people who participate in other user groups. Many
were curious why we were so successful, when their own user groups were
languishing. I offered what advice I could. On at least half a dozen
occasions participants in other user groups were very taken with our
Clinic and intended to take the idea home. This included one person
from India and another from Peru. Spreading ideas is one of the joyous
things about OSCON.

But the most important thing our booth accomplished was offering help
to local people who had not heard of us. Often people would ask me for
technical help. Usually I had no idea of the answer, but I could
certainly steer them to this list. Or I could refer them to the Clinic.
In fact, the most common expression was "my <relative> lives in <a
Portland neighborhood> and wants to get away from Windows." Hopefully a
lot of these will be showing up at the Clinic.

I personally benefited from lots of free coffee, food and beer. I also
scored a couple of cool t-shirts, a cap, a USB stick, a couple of
books, numerous CDs and miscellaneous other swags. But the best benefit
was meeting a lot of other open source people from all over the world.
For next year be sure to put OSCON on your calendar.




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