The week after GUADEC will be my last full week at OpenAdvantage. I’ve worked at UCE for 7 fun filled years on 3 different projects but now it’s time for a new challenge. Starting on 6th August I’ll be taking the post of Business Development Manager at Openedhand.

We’ve gone past our deadline (31st May) for announcing who has been accepted for sponsorship to attend GUADEC 2007. I can only apologise to all those who are waiting – we have had a high number of requests (as usual) and it’s taken time to collate all the information, and try to make a cut off is difficult. I give an absolute golden hand on heart promise that we will contact everyone before midday (GMT) 4th June.

On a related note could I remind all speakers who haven’t yet submitted costs (or even estimated costs) to us to please do so asap.

Yesterday I gave a talk for the fine folks at Birmingham BCS about VOIP – slides available here. Jono did the initial development of the presentation so the good bits are down to him – although we both tend to use the slides for prompts and they are probably not great without us to talk in front of them.

Anyway it was fun and there were plenty of good questions and my demo actually worked – I had trixbox running inVMware workstation connected to a couple of phones and then had my laptop connected to sipgate via GPRS on my N80. Workstation seems to cause some latency on the network, not sure what’s up with that, but it was good enough to demo – people could phone in, get the IVR, get through to one of the phones on the desk, leave voicemail, etc.

I thought it was a great demo of what’s possible when you decouple your phone number and PBX from particular sets of physical wires. To be fair, most to the interest was in real world issues of functionality, stability, support, etc, rather than my hacked up mobile PBX. I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again: asterisk and trixbox – you guys rock.

Dear Doc and VRM crew please could you encourage everyone involved to hurry up! People keep asking me for laptop recommendations, mostly for running Linux on but not always (but I’m always flattered in people’s belief that I have a clue), when all we really want to do is ask the internet;

select * from laptops where graphics_chipset=”Intel” and wireless_chipset not in (select * from bad_wifi) order by weight, price, …..

I don’t know much about VRM, and I’m not sure how I can contribute, but if anyone asked me what it is that would be my answer – so anytime you can make that happen I’ll be one happy fella. In the meantime if anyone cares to make recommendations leave a comment and I’ll pass them on.

So I’ve been a bit delinquent in providing some updates of the progress of GUADEC. In no particular order;

Thanks to the tireless and persuasive work of Bolsh our line up of keynote speakers is complete.

Ross and the rest of the planning committee have had the tricky job of selecting from the many many high quality entries, and completed the provisional schedule (provisional only in the sense that these things always end up changing for various external reasons).

Thos has been working tirelessly as a salesman / enforcer rounding up virtually every company in the GNOME commercial universe as a sponsor (more or less the only people to escape his iron grip being IBM). He’s also been keeping our budget in check, wrestling with the website in IE and 770/N800 browsers, and has the unenviable task of keeping notes in meetings and generally keeping us on track.

Rob has been chasing down merchandising options, and is building the registration module for Drupal.

Andreas, Claus, Aidan and other dudes from the GNOME marketing team have creating magazine adverts and press releases.

Sara, Christian, Baris, Murray, Quim and probably others whom I’ve forgotten (please remind me in a comment as I don’t want to forget) have all been helping tidy up the site, or keep us on track with feedback on guadec-list, or guadec-planning.

Info about Accommodation has gone up as well as GUADEC 2007 Map with the venue, and a few other POI (and as I get time & inspiration I shall be adding more). Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a way to share Google MyMaps (what an awkward name) unlike other Google stuff (docs, spreadsheets, notes, etc). If you can think of anything that should go on there then please drop me a line or leave a comment.

We hope to open registration asap – basically as soon Barclays can be bothered to help us out (Bastien and I have been wrestling with them for over a month now).

Anyone needing visas can now send a request and I’ll try and respond asap (especially for those not related to sponsorship). Anyone needing sponsorship should read the info page and submit a request.

There are plenty of opportunities for other folks to get involved;

We’re trying to keep paper to a minimum and to this end Bastien is rounding up volunteers to build as much of the brochure and other stuff onto a USB key for delegates. There’s loads of potential for doing exiting stuff; the key itself could be bootable distro, and could contain screencasts, demo code, presentations, sponsor {video,audio,document} ads, selected videos from GUADEC 2006/5/4/etc. Let your imagination run wild!

In previous GUADEC’s Andy Wingo has masterminded the filming and streaming of the sessions. Quite understandably he’d like to take a year off and just enjoy the conference, so we’re looking for volunteers to organise and run the filming of the talks. We may not be able (network wise) to stream all three tracks but probably should be able to handle the keynotes. It would be good if we could get the other sessions recorded and transcoded the same day ready to be uploaded off-site. Anyone interested should read Andy’s guide to steaming a conference but should also note this post about the benefits of not streaming, i.e. capturing, then editing/transcoding, then publishing.

That’s about all I can think of for now – other Guadeceros please chime in if I’ve forgotten anything.

Don’t be lazy and put your children’s sand pit toys in the dishwasher to clean them.

Dale Dougherty at O’Reilly captures the dilemma for conference organisers and the schwag bag. This something we’re wrestling with for GUADEC – we know that the majority of stuff given in schwag bags gets thrown away and we want to avoid that waste and drain on the environment. But we need a way to give sponsors some way of getting their material out to the attendees. The current idea is to replace the schwag bag with a usb key which contains all the conference materials (conference program, stuff from speakers, as well as sponsors material) and a simple printed timetable / program. However it’s a difficult trade off – if company X wants to be a cornerstone sponsor but insists on a wad of (paper) marketing material or branded doohickey to be distributed can we resist?

Aside: We realise of course that usb keys have an environmental impact, but the thinking is that since it is an intrinsically useful object it’s instantly recyclable. If you already have a higher storage, physically smaller, more stylish key already, feel free to simply hand it over to the first interesting person you meet in Birmingham, or take home to someone in need of portable storage.

Also saying that we’ll simply ‘put it on the usb key’ isn’t necessarily going to be easy. Someone needs to create a structure and design for that – the ability (possibly) for sponsors to brand their little subsection, the fact that they may not have web ready marketing material – whereas they may have print ready marketing material (or already have boxes of printed stuff for conferences). There are probably a million other problems with bucking the trend and trying to avoid paper marketing and other (primarily sponsor) related schwag bag contents.

Having said that we are a community conference, and we do have to provide ways for people to identify with our community, and as a conference ways for people to say ‘I was there’; T-shirts (both male and female styles), badges, stickers are what we’re thinking.

Just a quick reminder that you have less that two hours to become the owner of authentic Jono Bacon memorabilia and contribute to charity at the same time.

Just as a follow up to Ross’ reminder about the pending GUADEC 2007 CFP deadline.

One of the things we’ve talked about for GUADEC 2007 is a Gnome Love day focusing on all the different ways that someone could contribute to GNOME – providing tutorials for beginners, regulars and experts (although with the emphasis on beginners). Tutorials could be as simple as a half hour on a focused topic, and hour for more general, a half day or if you’re feeling brave a whole day.

Off the top of my head it would be great to see things like;

• writing your first GNOME app / applet (great to get tutorials in a range of languages).

• Using Glade / gtk+ / gnome libraries for UI building

• Beginners guide to UI design and practical use of the HIG

• UI testing

• Overview of the GNOME technology stack (how all the pieces like gtk+, pango, gnome-vfs, gconf, cairo, dbus, hal, gstreamer, X, compiz, etc, etc all fit together).

• Tutorials on any one or relevant combinations of the pieces.

• Performance tuning and optimisation

• Integrating with databases

• How to write documentation (linguistic / pedagogic approach)

• How to use documentation tools (Docbook etc)

• Bugsquad tutorial

• How to create Icons, Themes, etc (Tango tutorial?)

• Working with web API’s (RESTian, XML-RPC, SOAP)

• Sys admin of GNOME desktops – how to deploy and manage 100+ desktops.

This list is not meant to be comprehensive or exhaustive so feel free to leave suggestions in the comments. Of course don’t be discouraged if you’re thinking of submitting a paper that isn’t a tutorial we need plenty of those too so GNOME dudes,get submitting.

OK folks this is your chance to own some authentic Bacon memorabilia, and not just some picture or gold disc, a real life leather jacket as used by the Internet’s Jono Bacon – yes you too can feel the swaddling warmth of the jacket that looked after Jono for the last couple of years. Currently Jono is in prep for the BigRedRecording and what better way to celebrate that great work for charity (and donate at the same time) than bid on this exclusive collectors item. All proceeds go to the Red Nose Day charity (I’ll even cover any ebay and postage costs, so what you pay goes to charity) so get bidding.

Aside. Some may wonder how I came to acquire such a collectors item. The simple truth is that for some reason when he left to power the Ubuntu community Jono left his jacket in the kitchen at the office. Since he hasn’t popped back to pick it up during the last 5 months of autumn and winter I figured that it could be devoted to this higher purpose.