On Mon, Feb 28, 2005 at 02:57:23PM +0000, Brett Parker wrote:
MJ Ray mjr@dsl.pipex.com wrote:
Brett asked:
Can we assume that you're having a bad day?
Hell yeah!
I think a lot of people going to FOSDEM are just going through the motions. The reports coming back so far have been mostly about fringe things: I've only seen one person whose stuff I read often mentioning a mainstream talk, so far.
I think a lot of them where basically going for the socialising, and of course, there was a "debian" room, apparently. Maybe they went for that ;)
The thing that surprised me about FOSDEM (this year was the first time I'd been) was just how big it was. I was expecting a couple of hundred people or so, and one estimate of the actual number I heard was more like 5000.
I think at peak times there were probably in the region of 10 different talks taking place at any point in time; I knew the Debian dev room had a large number of talks and there was also quite a good embedded development room - hearing Wookey talk about the Netbook project was very interesting, for example.
I don't think the dev room talks really count as just "fringe" talks. It's probably a very good opportunity for a lot of projects to actually meet face to face, so their dev rooms are more useful than being at the talks listed on the main schedule.
And yes, there was a fair degree of socialising. ;)
J.