I’m happy to report that I’ll be presenting two sessions at OSCON 2008. The first session is called, “Greening the Conference Circuit” and the second is my (now-)usual Age of Literate Machines  presentation.

I had a set of goals for SCALE 6x, namely to:

• Identify five potential Mozilla Foundation grant recipients.
• Find three organizations willing to match some or all of our grants for a specific project or set of projects.
• Find three organizations who we can help implement (or improve their implementation) of some or all of the principles of the Mozilla Manifesto.
• Speak to one non-technical group about the importance of a free and open web.

In general, I didn’t get as many concrete results as I would have liked - but have a good deal to follow-up on.  More precisely:

Grants: Meh+

While I found more than enough potential grant recipients, few of them are working to advance all (or even most) of the Mozilla Manifesto, making them less than good grant candidates (but still often awesome projects). I think that I need to write a concise overview of what we are looking for (and carry printed copies) to help us better reach the projects we should be helping when I am at events.

Grant Matching: Fail

I didn’t get any concrete promises for grant matching (but got a few nibbles and leads.) I’ll report further after I followup - I may still get some concrete results.

Mozilla Manifesto Adoption: Pass

Getting people engaged with the manifesto was easier than I hoped.  I’m going to be asking for a lot public statements of support in the near future and am sure that I overshot this goal.

Talk to a Non-Tech Group: Fail

Unfortunately, I just ran out of time. On the plus side, I had a lot of good discussions on this topic with conference attendees who hadn’t thaught about why the web really matters.

Why did I focus on goals for SCALE?I want people to know what I hope to accomplish from my work. I hope that sharing ideas, plans and goals  will help others guide me to be more effective and vice versa. I know that here is a lot to improve in what I do and how I do it. This should provide another tool to help me do so.

While I met a lot of great people at SCALE  (Michael, Moose, Sharon and a host more) I had generally interesting non-private discussions with (or observations about) the following:

• Allison Randal - OSCON co-chair and Parrot architect - gave a great presentation on Parrot and an excellent  low-stress guide to effective speaking. We also spent some time plotting how to make OSCON a better vehicle for serving and growing the FLOSS community. I’ll post more about these discussions later.
• Chris Blizzard - Mozilla evangelist and OLPC‘r - despite us both working with the Mozilla project, we’ve never managed to sync up. It was a real pleasure to do be able to do so at SCALE. I heard great things about Chris’ presentation but unfortunately missed it.
• Danese Cooper - FLOSS advocate, OSI board member and mensch - Danese gave an exceptional mostly off-the-cuff presentation on gender and open source that I hope she’ll redo for OSCON.
• David Fetter - PostgreSQL advocate and man-of-wany-interests - PostgreSQL users in the Bay, go to the San Francisco Bay Area PostgreSQL Meetup! The group is active and friendly, and meetings are well-attended.
• Dru Lavigne - Canadian BSD advocate and trainer - Dru and crew are producing a BSD certification - visit http://www.bsdcertification.org/
• John Mark Walker - FLOSS advocate and Hyperic Community Manager - JM has started up http://bytesfree.org - an initiative to preserve citizen’s rights to access government provided information.
  
• Jono Bacon - Ubuntu communtiy manager, FLOS advocate and fellow metalhead - Jono is working hardto get people out to LUG Radio Live USA 2008. They’ve got a great lineup of speakers and a cheeky attitudethat should make it a fun event.
• Josh Berkus and Josh Drake - who are working to promote both PG Con 2008 and PostgreSQL Conference East. Also, around the time of SCALE, the PGSQL team shipped PostgreSQL 8.3, which David, Josh & Josh assure me now contains 93% more awesome. Both events are great values and are very community-focused. I’ll be at PGCon, giving a presentation on what the PGSQL community can learn from MySQL.
• Luke Kanies - FLOSS hacker - go check out his awesome Puppet system-admin tool.
• Rikki Kite - journalist - Rikki writes for Linux Magazine and is doing a series on women in FLOSS (such as this profile on Groklaw’s Pamela Jones). Rikki also wrote up a review of SCALE. Interestingly, she wrote of Adaora Onyia’s, “Hello, Can Anyone Hear Me?” session: “I wish I’d seen her talk earlier in my career because I picked up a lot of her lessons the hard way.” - I’d love to chat with Rikki about this, as the presentation left me feeling rather conflicted.
• Stormy Peters - Director of Community and Partner Programs at OpenLogic - her excellent, “What is a Community Manager?” presentation was useful for and interesting to many attendees.

I first met Switzerland-based Alain Sahli when he e-mailed me to ask whether he could translate an English article from ez.no into French. (Answer: most definitely yes; you must simply state that eZ owns the copyright with a link back to the original article, and the article must be published under the same license as the original.) I had to find out more about this benevolent eZ Publish user. How did he find out about eZ Publish and what does he use it for? As it turns out, Alain is an active contributor to the Open Source community and a budding entrepreneur to boot!

I've been happily editing away on the upcoming eZ Publish Advanced Content Management book (which builds upon eZ Publish Content Management Basics) for the past few months. We're in the final stretch now, and I'm poking my head out to share a dozen handy eZ Publish features that are explained in the book. Even after working with eZ Publish for over a year, I regularly uncover amazing built-in features. Hopefully some of these facts are new and useful for even advanced content managers!