So, the openSUSE Conference is well over now and most people must have recovered by now. The Greeks, having a very active openSUSE community, were first to organize an openSUSE Conference outside of the safe SUSE Towns Nuremberg and Prague! With only a little practical help from SUSE, they brought together almost 300 people in Thessaloniki. A stellar job in every way!
Well planned and executed
The team really did a great job planning and executing everything. On the Monday before the event, most work was done already and there was even time to do extra things like the daily Geeko Gazette! You wouldn’t have known that the team was still finalizing the venue arrangements due to a last minute change just a few weeks ago… It was helpful, of course, that the venue was at our disposal already on that Monday. Having 4 days to set up equipment, tables and decoration made it easy to go that extra mile.
The venue itself was a picture, too: a museum slash conference center, with a big room for the keynotes and a nice second room downstairs as well as several rooms upstairs for the workshops and BoF sessions. The main area at the entry was big (but not TOO big), with room for the booths, a door to the press room, toilets, food and drinks bar and the doors to the ‘beach bar’. The Beach bar, just outside, was – well, not at a beach, but it certainly had the right atmosphere! With some tables and chairs (and cover from the sun), a bar with refreshments available for (little) geeko money, and of course the foot baths, it was a great place to relax.
Preparations
Juergen went through all the rooms, checked and prepared video recording equipment and a day before the conference he held a little workshop for the video recording volunteers. And we got plenty of volunteers helping out! People wanted to do the recordings even despite one room having a really low ceiling. And on top of video recording the talks, we had a Raspberry Pi with two webcams constantly taking pictures of the main hall and feeding them to the website. All the talks and even one workshop track were recorded and live streamed. That made for a total of three live streams as well as 2 always-updating pictures of the main hall coming out, not even talking about the articles that were written and the tweets and facebook messages coming out of the press room. For people who missed the live stream, videos were recoded and uploaded to the youtube with a little delay. So just a day or so after conference ended, we had all recording online for people to see!
In the end preparations went pretty smoothly and there was still enough time to do some nice over the top stuff. So visitors were greeted by a big geeko on the window at the entry and if they wanted to, they could during the conference sit in the swimming pool, drink beer and discuss the future of openSUSE (and sometimes come up with some crazy ideas). Apart from that, there was a party every evening, with beers, cocktails and more crazy talking about openSUSE future. Somehow greeks managed to order relatively reasonably weather with clouds and even some refreshing rain every now and then!
Talks and workshops
There were 65 talks and workshops in total, with 9 workshops organized by the openSUSE team to spread some of the knowledge we’ve build up over the years. Another main goal of the event was to talk about where openSUSE has to go now – a discussion which is now starting. It was kicked off by Ralf Flaxa, talking about some history and the suggestions SUSE has for the future. On Sunday, our very own Jos Poortvliet keynoted about change and open governance in communities, discussing how we can guide ourselves in the direction we want to go.
Concluding
It was a great event and we’d like to join the news.o.o crew in thanking everybody involved!
The pictures here were taken from the Greeko oSC13 Google plus page.
Weekly statistics
As we didn’t post for a while, here are the weekly top contributors to Factory for the last two weeks!
Week 33
| Spot | Name |
| 1 | Raymond Wooninck |
| 2 | Dominique Leuenberger |
| 3 | Hrvoje Senjan |
| 4 | Stephan Kulow |
| 5 | Sascha Peilicke |
| 6 | Michael Schröder |
| 7 | Bjørn Lie, Andreas Stieger |
| 8 | Dirk Mueller |
| 9 | Marguerite Su |
| 10 | Tomáš Chvátal, Dr. Werner Fink |
Week 34
| Spot | Name |
| 1 | Stephan Kulow |
| 2 | Tomáš Chvátal |
| 3 | Hrvoje Senjan |
| 4 | Raymond Wooninck |
| 5 | Cristian Rodríguez, Andreas Stieger |
| 6 | Dr. Werner Fink |
| 7 | Sascha Peilicke, Bjørn Lie |
| 8 | Marcus Meissner, Hans-Peter Jansen |
| 9 | Michal Vyskocil |
| 10 | Marguerite Su, Frederic Crozat |
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