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It’s been a while, but here are my post-FOSDEM 2007 blabberings.

It’s amazing to see how the conference has grown, and how much people the ULB campus can handle…

Skimming the blog posts about FOSDEM, some lovely quotes about the conference are revealed. Words like “well organized” and “best I’ve been to” weren’t absent. So it definitely seems like we’re on a good track. In fact, the only thing that could make future editions fundamentally worse instead of better is that the event would become too big… Already, most of the devrooms were slightly undersized.

I’ve noticed that for many projects, a devroom at FOSDEM serves as a mini European conference on its own right. Add to this the two main tracks — which draw another kind of public on their own, and the successful lightning talks, and you get a very tightly packed conference. Which will not change in the future, because there really is no other option for the location at ULB. Where else would you find affordably three ( — one huge and two fairly large) auditoria plus countless classrooms nearby, all being that close to a city center and an international airport?

I finished the weekend with some fellow organizers in a nice typical restaurant, which was fun. I managed to forget my jacket there, but was able to go pick it up a week later.

It’s weird (and fun) to really be a part of the “organizing team”, although I’ve helped out at the infodesk for quite some years now, so I already knew some faces. With me now knowing the other organizers a bit better, and their being such fantastic dudes, logic predicts that I’ll be a bit more involved next year.

In the weeks before the conference, I made an effort to draw some attention to our website. The results were not bad, but not exceptionally good either. And guess what happened the day before the event… Worldwide, blog engines were fired up and spit out an avalanche of organic word-of-mouth FOSDEM buzz… completely effortless.

I think we can consider us lucky if nex year’s FOSDEM can be as good as this one… We’ll certainly aim for it.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 14th, 2007 at 19:58 and is filed under English, Open source, Software, Web stuff. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will appear immediately, but I reserve the right to delete innapropriate comments.