FSOSS, you almost killed me.
It’s Tuesday and I’ve almost recovered from the sleep deprivation caused by agreeing to be co-chair for FSOSS this year. What an amazing two days. The thought of trying to recount all the good moments exhausts me even more; luckily I don’t have to, as all of the talks are now on-line. Our communication arts students and A/V folks filmed everything, and the presenters were good enough to agree to having their shtick posted under a Creative Commons license. We’ve also got most of the slides, and are now working to integrate them into the raw video footage. For now, and for the impatient (like me), we’ve posted everything in DivX format. Over the next little bit we’ll be adding WM, QT, Real, and MP3. The three keynotes were filmed in both close-up and wide angle formats, hence the .Wide versions. You can check-out the talk list here to figure out what each file is.
While all the talks were excellent, I want to say a special thanks to all those from Mozilla who made the day extra special. Shaver’s opening keynote was delivered with grace and thoughtfulness. It was clear he’d spent time pondering his chosen topic, and the end result was an incredibly quotable look at how to engage and include participation in open source. The jokes were fast and just below the radar, delivered with the dry sensibility for which Mike is so well known. I loved it, and I couldn’t have asked for a better start to the day. Man, this guy can talk!
From there the day exploded into five separate tracks. Scattered throughout were Blizzard’s talk on OLPC (check out his interview with CityTV here), Phil’s talk on supercomputing (UPDATE: filenames fixed), and Eric Shepherd’s talk on open source documentation. The day ended the same way it had begun, with an amazing talk by Nat Friedman. As I walked into the room I saw Nat stretching on the stage. Any talk that requires you to stretch first is well worth the price of admission. I can’t do this one justice either, you have to watch it to believe it.
Congratulations to all our speakers, and thank you for your generous support of FSOSS. See you next year.
UPDATE: Fixed the links to the keynotes, which were using a version with poor audio. The new ones are good.