Registration is now open for the OpenNMS User Conference in Europe this May
This is one of my favorite events of the year, and this year we are making available two days of training – “bootcamp-style” accelerated lectures that are the fastest way to come up to speed on OpenNMS.
Hope to see you there,
Just wanted to post a note that Dr. Craig Gallen and myself will be at the TM Forum Management World conference in Orlando this week.
The TM Forum organizes proof of concept demonstrations called “catalysts”. We are participating in one with the auspicious name of “Alarm Management for Converged Networks”. For several years now we have been supporting the development of standardized management interfaces, and this catalyst will demonstrate one for dealing with alarms across large, diverse networks.
The main sponsors are Deutsche Telecom, T-Mobile, Vodafone and D2 GmbH. We are participating along with Comarch, HP, and Netage Solutions to demonstrate an implementation of the new interfaces.
Drop me a note if you happen to be at the conference, and I hope to see you there.
Just a reminder that I will be speaking (along with a lot of people much more interesting than me) at the Ohio LinuxFest the second weekend in September. On a side note, September 10th will mark 10 years since I started working on OpenNMS.
In any case, the organizers are offering a prize to the 1000th person to register for the conference. The Enthusiast level is free, so if you can be in Columbus, Ohio, you should check it out.
This year I’ve been doing a talk at conferences this year on marketing an open source business, which is a little recursive, since one way to market open source is to speak at conferences.
The next one will be OSCON in Portland next week. If any of my three readers plans to be there, drop me a note and we’ll be sure to meet up. If you are not coming to the conference but are in the area and want to get together, drop me a note as well. The main nights of the conference (Wednesday and Thursday) are booked, but I’m open Tuesday night if folks want to meet somewhere downtown.
I certainly hope a lot of people show up, as there are eighteen (18!) other talks going on at the same time as mine, including one by Chris Dibona (which always seems to happen to me). That’s insane. But in any case, stop in on Thursday from 13:40 to 14:20 if you are interested.
And I just found out I’ll be speaking at the Ohio LinuxFest in September. I had a blast last time, and I hope to see a lot of old friends and make new ones.
Did I mention there’s a Jeni’s in Columbus?
The next OpenNMS Users Conference in Europe will be held 10-11 May, 2012 back in lovely Fulda, Germany.
Building on the last three years of this conference, we’ll be changing the format yet again.
The first day will be a traditional conference. We will have a call for papers and set up several tracks for people to get the most out of their OpenNMS experience.
The second day will be a barcamp, an “un-conference” similar to what we did this year. The attendees will determine what they want to see.
In between will have another social outing involving fine German beer.
For those who are interested, just before the conference we will offer two days of intense training on OpenNMS. On 8 May we will have a repeat of the training I did on the first day this year – covering all of the basics of OpenNMS, and on 9 May we will have an advanced training day, building on that. So if you came to the conference this year, you can choose to show up a day early and build on what you learned, and if you didn’t make it this year you can attended both days if you like.
Hope to see you there.
I’m going to be speaking at OSCON again this year.
I’ll be following up last year’s “So You Think You Want to Start an Open Source Business” with a talk on open source marketing.
It’s at 1:40 pm on Thursday.
If you are on the fence about going to OSCON, take 20% off any package by using the code “Balog”.
Hope to see you there, and don’t say I never gave ya nothin’.
It was sometime Saturday night, after my third, or fifth, or seventh top-shelf margarita (thanks Rackspace), sometime after David’s Dual Core set, that I turned to Jeff and said “I love my job. I’m at work now.”
Once again the SouthEast LinuxFest was a success. Now in its third year, this is a well organized FOSS conference held in Spartanburg, South Carolina. I went for the first time last year when we were a sponsor and had a blast. It was just as good this year.
While spread out over three days, the conference peaks on Saturday with a day chock full of presentations bookended by two keynotes.
The opening keynote was given by Jon “Maddog” Hall. A Maddog talk is like pizza: When it’s good, it is really good, and when it’s bad, it’s still pretty good.
This keynote was really good.
Maddog presented how free and open source software can both create jobs and provide better solutions. It was peppered with his usual stories and concrete examples that really drove the point home. I’m going to have to steal much of it.
The opening keynote was followed by a number of talks. This year they decreased the number of tracks down to five, which I think was a great idea, but it made it hard to choose at times. While I was in Klaatu’s Kdenlive talk, we could hear massive laughter coming from the next room, where Alan Hicks was giving his presentation (apparently, whenever he found an error on one of his slides he’d remark “Well, I was drunk when I wrote that”).
My talk went okay. It had a rather humorous setup that was lost due to the quality of the video projectors, but the rest of the talk went well. The session laptops, provided by HP, screamed, however.
The closing keynote was given by Tom “Spot” Callaway on how to tell if a project is doomed to fail. He went over a number aspects of open source projects and assigns “points of FAIL” for various things the project does or doesn’t do. The talk originated as a blog post that became a chapter in the Open Source Way book, and Spot did a good job presenting it (although I disagreed with him, to a point, on copyright assignment).
He did get one of the biggest laughs of the conference when his first few slides consisted of the word “cloud” repeated over and over again. As someone who said a long time ago that if I heard the word “cloud” one more time I was going to vomit, I agreed wholeheartedly with the sentiment.
As usual with such conferences, no matter how good the talks are, the conversations held in the hallway can be even better. I saw a lot of old friends and made some new ones. I know how much work goes into these things, so hats off to the whole SELF team for another amazing year.
Man, I’ve been slammed lately, so let me apologize for taking two weeks to write about my trip to the Indiana LinuxFest (ILF) in Indianapolis.
I was kind of surprised when Matthew Williams, one of the main organizers of the ILF, contacted me and asked me to keynote. While I’ve been both deeply involved and committed to free and open source software for over a decade, I don’t really view myself as a spokesperson for the FOSS community as a whole. I’m just part of a small team that is using open source as a way to make a living. And while I can talk about OpenNMS for hours, it was a different experience to chat about something “keynote worthy”.
The topic I chose was an examination of how the divisions within the FOSS community actual foster innovation and improvement. I titled it “Why We All Can’t Get Along (I Why This is a Good Thing)”. I think it was well received and it was fun to think about.
The conference as a whole was a lot of fun. I have to admit that I agree with Brian Aker that the most rewarding part of most conferences is what happens outside of the presentations, and to that end I got to spend a lot of time talking with Bradley Kuhn and Brian Proffitt. That night, we were joined by Carol Smith and Daniel Klein of Google. Most people know Carol as the Summer of Code maven. Daniel works out of the Pittsburgh office and has network management as one of his responsibilities (he has written the software he uses at the moment but I’m hoping to get him interested in OpenNMS).
(Left to Right: Bradley, Brian, Carol and Daniel)
The only criticism I can level at the conference, and this applies to most new grassroots events I attend, is limit the number of tracks. I would say have one track for (at a minimum) every 100 people you expect to attend. This is confirmed people, not how many you’d like to attend or how many you hope will attend – be very honest with yourself and don’t worry about hurting the feelings of any speakers you have to exclude. Your attendees will appreciate a more streamlined conference and the speakers who are there will appreciate fuller rooms. The worst example was last year’s SELF conference that had about seven tracks, and it just got confusing.
Anyway, speaking of conferences, we have two OpenNMS User Conferences coming up this year.
The third annual OpenNMS Users Conference Europe. This will be held 26-27 May in Fulda, Germany, just outside of Frankfurt. The first day will consist of a class on OpenNMS covering the basics of installation, provisioning, event management, service assurance and data collection. The second day will be a barcamp-style day with presentations chosen by the attendees. We’ve had a large amount of interest so far and I hope it builds as we get closer to the date.
Mike Huot (OGP) suggested that we hold a conference in the US, so we’re doing something similar on 17-18 June in Minneapolis, Minnesota. This promises to be a lot of fun, since it is in advance of our annual Developer’s Conference, Dev-Jam so we should have OpenNMS contributors from all over the world for both events. If you are just starting out with OpenNMS or you have advanced questions, this will be the place to be.
Finally, let me make it clear that we welcome anyone to come to Dev-Jam for a week of OpenNMS geekery, and only the slightest bit of nudity. Held at the University of Minnesota, we take over a large “club room” in a dorm and hack on OpenNMS for the whole week. It is one of my favorite times of the year.
In other conference news, I’ll be speaking at this year’s Southeast LinuxFest, also in June, and I hope to be at OSCON this year, but they’ve been a little late announcing speakers so I’m not sure if I’ll be there or not.
Hope to see you all, in person, at some point soon.
I’ll be speaking on Saturday at the first ever Indiana Linux Fest. I’m looking forward to it, and if you want to get into the spirit check out the introduction to the Linux Outlaws #195 podcast. Funny.
The third annual OpenNMS Users Conference – Europe will be held 26-27 May in Fulda, Germany.
Registration is now open:
http://www.opennms-conference.info
Hope to see you there.