Community Matters

More than a thousand people attended the MeeGo Conference 2010. Hundreds more watched the live streams of keynotes and track 1. The energy in the hall ways was impressive.

Since I organized the event, I was hesitant to write much about it here, but then I figured “why not”.

It was an amazing show of excitement and interest by a surprisingly large crowd of mostly developers that came to Dublin to talk for a few days about the future of their OS. As an organizer, the event exceeded all of my expectations. More attendees from more countries and more companies than I thought we’d get in my wildest dreams. 70 sessions in the reviewed traditional conference. Another 30 or so during the unconference on day 3. Great tutorials and workshop, organized by the community (thanks Dave Neary for all your help). A fun run with about 35 attendees out at 6:45 in the morning for about 5.5km through Dublin. It all came together very well.

What were the highlights for me?

• Attendance, energy and “feel” of the event.
• The number of top developers / maintainers who attended and gave talks on their subject matters. Gnome people, KDE people, kernel people, tool people, community people, commercial people. MeeGo people.
• The Guinness party and the Ireland-Norway match. That will be hard to top.
• I really wanted to call out one talk or session that I liked best – but I can’t. Too many great ones to chose from.

Was everything perfect? No. We had issues with the registration system (a bunch of registrations apparently got lost somewhere – but we made things up on site). The give-away didn’t go as planned because a storm the week before the conference delayed the arrival of the Lenovo S10 that we were planning to hand out. There were a bunch of other hickups here and there that we hope we hid well from the attendees. But given that this was the first external conference that we had organized and given that the event ended up hosting about twice as many people as we had planned, I think things went very well.

Thanks to everyone who attended – I can’t wait to do this again next May.