Tag Archives: conference

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Thoughts on Grace Hopper

I’ve been at Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing for the past two days – soaking in the presence of over 2000 women in computing at a sprawling conference here in Atlanta.

The interesting thing about this conference is how much the same it feels to me as any other large conference I attend, and a couple small ways that it is very different. I realized while I was here how I have spent the last few years surrounding myself with accomplished, amazing women like Jen Redman, Leslie Hawthorn, Claire McCabe and Sarah Sharp. What’s funny is that we’re connected by Portland (although Claire is down in Oakland… for now…), and we’re all at Grace Hopper this week. They, among many others, made me feel right at home.

I feel the dislocation of being at a conference comprised 95% (or more) of women. There’s an odd politeness that I’m not used to. There are a lot of people who are in academia or industry who wear suits and use words like ‘leverage’ without irony. There were tons of students – over 900 of them, and an incredible job fair. And I was shocked at the number of people who asked me: What exactly is free and open source software?

As congratulatory as those of us who are “in” the free software world about having essentially won out over proprietary software, there is a huge, mainstream portion of the computing world who are not aware. I’m not saying that a person needs to understand the minutia of license differences, or have even read one. But wow, there is an incredible missed opportunity when a computer science student can graduate without knowing what open source even *is*.

So, congratulations to the women who put the first ever Open Source Track at Grace Hopper together: Jen Redman, Cat Allman, Sandra Covington, Sara Ford, Jenny Han Donnelly, Leslie Hawthorn, Avni Khatri, Stormy Peters, Hilary Pike, and Natalia Vinnik. I was very happy to participate in the “getting started in open source” panel. And many thanks to the NSA for sponsoring the hackathon with Sahana, a very worthy project, and one that I hope is infused with new excitement and contribution from the 200 people who signed up to participate. I hear that we’ll be having a hackathon again next year in Portland — when Grace Hopper comes to our very own city!

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Open Source Bridge: Thank you all

Representing @osb09 on Twitpic

Open Source Bridge ended yesterday at midnight. We wrapped things up at the Hacker Lounge, with interviews courtesy of Strange Love Live, and tons of hackers still coding through the evening. My head was just buzzing from all of the great conversations I’ve had over the last three days.

Thank you to all of the speakers, volunteers and my fellow board members, Audrey Eschright and Jake Kuramoto. Thank you to the core organizing committee, designers and hackers – Reid, Igal, Rick, Adam, Bram and osbridgebot. Thank you to Christie Koehler who did an amazing job with managing volunteers these last three days.

Thank you especially to Peter Eschright, who swooped in and made sure that all of our Logistical issues were solved. Thank you Cami and Dr. Normal from Strange Love Live, and Kelly for all your advocacy work on behalf of the conference. Thank you Steph for your last minute awesome work on the speaker party. Thank you to Beer and Blog and WebTrends for hosting our evening party on Friday *and* our speaker party.

Thank you Amber Case, Kurt von Finck, Mayor Sam Adams and Ward Cunningham for giving entertaining and inspiring keynotes each day. Thanks to Chris Messina for helping kick off our unconference on Friday.

Thank you everyone who came and participated in the conference. Your enthusiasm and passion was inspiring. I appreciated all of the encouragement you gave me and all the other volunteers throughout the time we were there together. All those kind words add up, and so many people were just glowing from the praise.

If you attended the conference, respond to our survey! Also, comments are open on sessions, so please leave comments about the specific sessions you attended. We’ll forward the feedback to the speakers.

I’m still smiling, and soaking it all in. But we’re definitely doing this again next year. 🙂

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Report from SCaLE 7x

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Awesome booth volunteers Noel and Erez!

In the elevator this morning, a person asked me if I was with the SCaLE conference. He started by saying that he was really happy that we (the people attending the conference) were there, and that he hoped for Linux to be successful. And then he said, “I’m a linux supporter, but I’m a windows captive.”

Because I work every day with free software, I lose touch with people who feel trapped by their operating system. That moment in the elevator reminded me that not everyone is as lucky as I am!

This is my second year attending SCaLE. I’m just as excited as I was last year about the number of end users, systems administrators, and enthusiastic supporters of free and open source software. During Joe Brockmeier’s keynote, he asked the crowd to raise their hands if they were already contributing to an open source project, and less than 1/3 of the crowd raised their hands. Other conferences I attend seem to attract mostly people who are already contributors. I’m very happy to see SCaLE having a wider reach.

My favorite event was definitely the PostgreSQL LAPUG birds of a feather session on Saturday evening. We filled the room and had to fetch chairs from outside! Josh Berkus and Magnus Hagander provided some great slides that I used for a quick tour through new SQL programming, administrative and security features in the upcoming release of 8.4. This presentation was basically a tag team effort between myself and Josh.

More than 3/4 of the people had never attended a PostgreSQL user group meeting before, and I hope to hear that they all subscribe to the mailing list and attend some meetings!

We had great traffic at the Postgres booth. There were a surprising number of people who asked about migrating from MSSQL to Postgres. Fortunately, we had at least one person with a fair amount of Windows experience at the booth (Thanks, John!). I also was grateful that many people stopped by with follow up questions about the filesystems I/O talk I gave. I really felt like it was well received, and I hope that we end up with a few new recruits to our testing.

Great show! And now I’m off to relax downstairs before I work a downtime this evening 🙂

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Gratitude, freedom and open source

Audrey just wrote a fantastic blog entry about Open Source Bridge, her thoughts about citizenship, and what it means to be a responsible open source citizen.

Yesterday, Forbes published a piece talking about the “open source collaboration gap” and waxed poetic about why it is that corporate IT doesn’t contribute back to open source projects the way that individuals do.

One possible explanation from the article is that there is really a gratitude gap – institutions just can’t feel gratitude or express gratitude the way that individuals can. I kinda like that idea. But paradoxically, Dan Woods then suggests that if we were to just measure the tangible benefits of open source, we’d have our argument for IT contributing back. Well, if the problem is gratitude.. I can’t say that I agree that more metrics are going to fix the collaboration gap.

So, I would try to solve this problem differently. I think that changing collaboration patterns happens one person at a time – with individuals deciding to pursue hobbies and work that interest them, hopefully doing work that matters. To make institutions better open source citizens, they have to change their policies and behaviors so that they encourage, rather than discourage individual contributions.

Encourage individuals to contribute to open source projects from inside large companies, and let individual interest and creativity guide those contributions. The Free Software Foundation was created by a guy who just wanted to solve a problem with a printer. If you run a company, let your employees solve their problems!

That freedom to think, be creative and do something that matters are the parts of my community and my work I most value.

So, if there’s something about free and open source software, your development community, your personal project that inspires you, please submit a proposal to our conference. We want to hear from you!

Photo courtesy of flickr user kalandrakas, under a Creative Commons license.

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Open Source Bridge

wordle rocks

There’s going to be a new conference in Portland next July.

We’re calling it Open Source Bridge.

Our goal is this:

Create a completely volunteer-run, community conference to connect developers working with open source.

Let me explain with a little background:

My first tech conference was LISA in San Diego in 1997. I ran into Linus Torvalds in the hallway with my friend Steve, and we were both star-struck. I was still a student at the time, and loved every minute I spent rubbing elbows with people that were the pop-stars of the UNIXy world.

Since then, I attended LISA a few more times, OSCON, countless user group meetings for Perl, PostgreSQL. The last two years have been filled with local unconferences (BarCampPortland and WhereCampPDX to name just two) and travel to incredible community conferences like PgCon, LUG Radio Live, SCALE, Northwest Linux Fest, the Linux Plumbers Conference and last weekend’s Mentor Summit. And while on the board of the Legion of Tech, I’ve met and connected with more people than I ever thought I could know in Portland.

I love conferences. And I love Portland. Maybe you can guess what’s coming next.

During an intense brainstorming session at Side Project To Startup, a group of concerned Portlanders drew together a plan for a new conference. We packed a tiny room, and had a heated discussion about what we wanted, what Portland needed, and how we might do it. By the end of the session, Audrey Eschright and I agreed to co-chair. And with the support of Portland’s incredible tech community, we knew we could make it happen.

We called a few people, and I invited everyone over to talk about what to do next. We were: Audrey, Reid Beels, Professor Bart Massey, Rick Turoczy, Jake Kuramoto, Dawn Foster, Kelly Guimont, Adam Duvander.

We looked at the giant pieces of paper we’d scribbled notes on a few weeks before, and ate dinner together on a warm fall evening. And we decided to have a Town Hall.

town hall meeting, Oct 30, 2008, 7.30pm, Cubespace

Since then, we’ve been joined by Ward Cunningham (AboutUs), Irene Schwarting (Companies By Design), Harvey Mathews (SAO) and Clay Neal (City of Portland).

But enough with the history lesson!

Open Source Bridge will bring together the diverse tech communities of the greater Portland area and showcase our unique and thriving open source environment.

Open Source Bridge will have curated, discussion-focused conference sessions, mini-conferences for critical topics and will include unconference sessions.

We will show how well Portland does open source and share our best practices for development, community and connectedness with the rest of the world.

Lots of ideas are buzzing around in our heads, and we’d love to talk about them with you! If you’d like to contribute to the effort, stop by the town hall event October 30, 2008 at Cubespace. We’ll have another meeting November 6th, and it will be announced on Calagator.

At the town hall, you’ll have a chance to meet the members of the core organizing committee, and pick up a responsibility or two. We’ll be breaking off into teams for each of the major areas requiring organization, and distributing the work across many people. We will create a mailing list after this first meeting for those who just want to hear about what we’re up to, or participate in some other way.

Thanks for your interest, and we hope to see you tomorrow night!

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Mentor Summit Report for PostgreSQL

mentor summit

Update: Fixed the etherboot wiki link.

I attended the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit this past weekend on behalf of PostgreSQL. We met at the Google campus in Mountain View.

This event was an unconference and so, none of the sessions were determined in advance.

Some of the highlights were:

  • Leslie Hawthorn and Chris DiBona went into some detail with the whole group about the selection process for GSOC. This session made me feel as though PostgreSQL had relatively good chances for being accepted again next year. Google, however, does not pre-announce projects/products, so there is no sure thing about our (or any other project’s) involvement.
  • I met MusicBrainz guys and was pleased to receive many bars of chocolate they requested to be distributed to SFPUG and PDXPUG members as thanks for making an great database.
  • Attended three sessions concerning recruitment and retention of students. This is a topic that many people were interested in, but that few people feel they have a proper strategy for.

I also led a session on recruitment and retention of students to open source projects. Some of the ideas that came out of that and the related sessions were:

  • Determine what makes you personally need to be part of Postgres (joy of learning, scratching a technical itch, making a tool for your job, fame). Find out which of those things your student also needs or wants and try to give that or help your student achieve that thing.
  • Have a clearly defined method for students to keep journals. Several projects simply used MediaWiki and templates.
  • Use git (or other distributed revision control), and have students commit early and often to a branch that mentors have access to.
  • The Etherboot project has a great system: http://etherboot.org/wiki/soc/2008/start
  • Hold weekly meetings over IRC. These can be brief, but help get students accustomed to your project’s culture and way of doing things.
  • Ask the student: “are you on track?”, ask the mentor: “do you think the student is on track?” on a weekly basis
  • If you want students to stick around, find incremental responsibilities to assign that are driven by their enthusiasm.
  • Interview on the phone all your students ahead of time, not just the ones you think might be a problem.
  • Require a phone number on the application for the student.
  • Require a secondary contact so that if the student “disappears” there’s a backup person to contact. (and contact that person BEFORE SoC starts)

I made good connections with members of Git, Parrot, WorldForge, Ruby and many other community leaders. I was particularly impressed by the ideas and stories from the current Debian project leader, Steve McIntyre and Gentoo council member Donnie Berkholz. Donnie recommended some books about recruitment that I plan to read and review in the next few weeks.

The issue of mailing list moderation and the number of people required to keep mailing lists functioning properly came up frequently. If you know a moderator for a Postgres mailing list, please consider thanking them for doing a very tedious, extremely important and often thankless job.

I also spent some time discussing with Leslie Hawthorn and Cat Allman how to increase the total number of women mentors and students next year. Leslie and I shared some ideas and I offered to help implement them next year. One thing the crowd asked for was explicit training on how to recruit and manage female students. Realistically, this information will apply to all students, and I hope this training helps us recruit more students overall.

I thought the conference went quite well. I hope PostgreSQL is accepted next year, and that one of our mentors is able to attend this conference. And, if you go, be sure to register for the hotel early, and stay at the Wild Palms.

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PgDay EU – Best conference ever?

PgEU conference Photo
Smiling, PostgreSQL-using conference goers

Anyone who went will likely tell you how much they enjoyed PGDay EU 2008. My biggest regret this year is that I was unable to attend.

Magnus Hagander’s Planet blog is still missing, so I’m blogging the link to his fabulous photos for him. If you see any pictures with missing names or labels, please let him know at magnus -at- hagander (dot) net.

This conference was once again led by Gabriele Bartolini, and a large supporting team – including the other board members of PgEU – Magnus Hagander, Jean-Paul Argudo and Andreas Scherbaum. PgEU (for those that don’t know) is a non-profit dedicated to promoting PostgreSQL in European nations. Next year, this conference will be held somewhere in France! Stay tuned to planet.postgresql.org for details!

Update:

My favorite photo:
lolcats and greg stark

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PostgreSQL Conference: Friday night dinner

taking shots
How to have fun, PostgreSQL-style

Those of you in town on Friday evening are welcome to join us at Paddy’s at 6pm for dinner:

Paddy’s Bar & Grill
65 SW Yamhill St
Portland, OR 97204

The reservation is under ‘Selena’, and we’ll be sitting in the front. The MAX runs directly in front of the restaurant.

Food is good – vegetarian-friendly, but not necessarily vegan or gluten-free. Those looking for those types of food options, let me know – there are actually excellent places nearby to eat, and you could join us a little later for socializing after a proper meal.

I’ll be directing those that want dinner at the Code Sprint over there – so I asked for 20 seats. Please comment or email me if you plan to attend, so that I can ask for more space if we fill up.

This isn’t a sponsored dinner – so we’ll all go dutch, unless a generous member of a company would like to sponsor us 🙂

I imagine several members of PDXPUG will be there. Can’t wait to see you all!

conference, portland, postgres, postgresql , , , , 2 Comments

What I’m going to see at PostgreSQL Conference West

lifeline
“I’d like to use my lifeline to figure out what to go to at PostgreSQL Conference West…”*

PostgreSQL Conference West is coming up this October 10-12, and the schedule was just published. Unfortunately, it’s a little tricky to navigate the list of talks on the site, so I decided to post my itinerary to help you if you’re looking for a guide!

So, I cheated a little and included some things that I won’t be able to see – but there’s really a lot of good stuff.

I’m so happy to see so many Portland locals presenting at this conference! All the Portlanders called out below are members of PDXPUG. Our next meeting is on October 16, 2008, 7pm at FreeGeek.

It shows how strong our community is that we were able to support two PostgreSQL-specific conferences (the earlier was PDXPUG day before OSCON) IN PORTLAND this year!!! Yay for us.

Here’s what I’ll be attending:

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