mwh.geek.nz

Tuesday I didn’t have a talk, so I got to enjoy the conference itself instead of repeated practice. First up was Gabriella Coleman‘s keynote, which was just fantastic. She’s basically a geek anthropologist and it was one of the most interesting talks I’ve been to.

I spent the whole day at the Open in the Public Sector miniconf, where I have plenty of interest but no experience. There were a few great talks there. Pia Waugh’s especially was brilliant and had a good point about the need for transparency in how public enagement is run. She’s the ICT advisor to an Australian Senator and it seems like both she and her boss get it. I liked her advice to other politicians: “get yourself an open-source geek”. The panel discussion with Clare Curran and Pia again was interesting, though Clare went on a bit sometimes. Trevor Mallard was there but not speaking, but he was pretty impressive in informal chat in the breaks. After that was the Speakers Dinner at Te Papa, which was nice enough. I did get to sit at a table with Ted Ts’o and Keith Packard. I left a little early and was still pretty shattered afterwards and the next day.

Wednesday was the first day of the conference proper. The highlight for me was Matthew Garrett’s talk on social conduct in the community, and Sage Weil from Dreamhost talking about their Ceph distributed filesystem (and mentioning that if you want to try it, and don’t have a huge cluster, you can sign up to Dreamhost with code “ceph”). Nothing on that night, so I was able to get some sleep.

Thursday brought two talks from Leslie Hawthorn on community management, mentoring, and bringing in new contributors. The mentoring talk was the most valuable and had a lot of content I think we need to take note of. I have good notes on both of those that I’ll bring to the mailing list later. The Professional Delegates’ Networking Session was that night, which I was technically eligible for, but I went home to work on my slides and talk instead. Also to catch up on sleep.

Friday to come later on.