[sldev] Trip Report - OSCON 2007

[Liana Holmberg]

As part of our commitment to transparency, Lindens always send  a trip 
report to the whole company after we've been out of the office for a 
meeting. In the interest of extending that transparency, here's a copy 
of my trip report for OSCON.

- - - -

I went to OSCON to get a crash course in open source community building, 
meet OS contributors, and place our initiative within the wider context 
of open source projects. I got what I needed out of the experience, 
though the talks themselves were a mixed bag (sometimes the signal was 
in how people were approaching a topic rather than what they were 
saying). Here's the run down of takeaways and amusing tidbits.

KEYNOTES of NOTE
Philip's keynote was well attended, especially considering it was 8:45AM 
and the last day of the con. See it here 
http://oscon.blip.tv/file/322590. Our main goals were to express LL's 
commitment to open sourcing everything we can; let people know (who 
didn't already) that the server source is coming; encourage people to 
work on the SL project; and put SL in context as an app that is changing 
the way people do everything, from business to communications. Our 
uptake stats are great for a new project, but there is much to be done 
and we need all the help we can muster.

Steve Yegge, "How to Ignore Marketing and Become Irrelevant in 2 Easy Steps"
Steve is a Software Engineer at Google and runs a blog full of drunken 
rants (http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/). What else would make him 
eminently qualified to talk about marketing open source projects?  
Though his slides didn't work, his basic point was clear, and echoed by 
many of the other session panelists:  Branding matters, even in open 
source. No particular action point from this, just something to keep in 
mind.

Rick Falkvinge, founder of the Swedish Pirate Party
Aaaaaargh. Inspiring message here was how capturing just 4% of the vote 
could actually cause change in the 2 major political parties.


SESSIONS
The Art of Community
Description and panelists here 
http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/os2007/view/e_sess/12589
Good panel discussion of keys to keeping an os community functioning and 
vibrant.
Dawn Foster of Jive Software was acknowledged by several folks for 
having developed a good reputation system. It's built in to Clearspace 
X. Does anyone have experience with how well this works and if 
reputation systems are really needed in open source projects?

Google Summer of Code
I'll look into if/how we'd like to participate in this. FAQ 
http://code.google.com/support/bin/topic.py?topic=10442

Licensing sessions
I went to just about all of these and was underwhelmed. One Googlawyer 
joked that 99.7% of lawyers give the other .03% a bad name. I've worked 
with some great lawyers, so I don't think the percentages are that bad. 
Nevertheless, the OSCON showing was not very useful. In one session I 
heard the longest sentences ever spoken aloud -- with little discernible 
substance, natch. For all the excitement around OS licenses, there is 
very little practical advice from legal counsel regarding their 
application and various uses.

EXHIBIT HALL
-If we ever have a conference booth, let's skip all the usual stuff. 
Just put SL up on a big screen and surround the booth with white boards 
and lots of markers.
-Took names of several projects we might want to encourage to integrate 
into SL. My notes are at home for this, so ping me if you want specific 
names.
-One Laptop Per Child
What a cool, cool PC. Demoed by Oregon SU students who are working on 
the project. What can we do to help this out?

OTHER
-Talked to an O'Reily researcher about managing and opening up our data. 
Handing that contact off to the Data Warehouse team.
-Lunch: sat with Red Hat CTO Michael Tiemann. He wondered if SL could be 
used as a climate change modeler -- and a way to change people's 
behavior. Interesting idea.
-Had drinks at bos's hotel bar, which was full of Googlers who 
graciously picked up our tab. I should have ordered the Macallan 25.


WORTH IT?
This trip was definitely worth the time and expense as part of my 
"onboarding" into the open source initiative. We should continue to have 
a strong presence as OSCON, because open 3D Internet protocols and code 
will only become more relevant at this venue.

Bonus: Getting away from the infinite daily distractions of the office 
allowed Rob, Phoenix, Philip, Bos, and me to focus on the needs and next 
steps of the open source initiative and do some team bonding. Takeaways: 
/Neuromancer/ is better than /Snowcrash/; and the popular choice for the 
"if you could be live a day in someone else's brain" game was Richard 
Feynman.