Stormy Peters asked in a recent blog post why people really go to conferences, and took a very interesting poll. It’s a good question. Travel is exciting, but rarely comfortable. Why do we do it?

The answers in Stormy’s poll turned out overwhemlingly to be “people”—over 50% of respondents answered that the one single thing that drew them to conferences was meeting other attendees. This is perhaps unsurprising, particularly since the statistical sample was completely made up of open-source folks, who tend to be more outgoing and people-oriented than the average developer. Another answer high on the list was “meeting the speakers”, which I believe is indicative of the very level playing field in which we participate.

But I think the real answer is deeper than that. Other answers high on the list had to do with attending talks, hacking with friends, and learning more about interesting topics (this is based on the published survey responses). I tend to put these things in a blender and look at the whole picture together—people attend conferences to learn about interesting things with their friends, to make new friends at the same time.

So far as I can tell, this is the end goal of Community, with a capital C. Conferences are the physical manifestation of the activities we perform in all of the communities to which we belong. When we talk about being part of a community, whether it is the Linux community or the open-source community or the embedded or real-time, or BitBake or Git or Beagle Board communities, the whole point is that we are part of those communities—we participate, we learn interesting things, and we do it by hanging out with existing friends and making new ones. We contribute to the whole, which would not be complete without us. As Jono Bacon said in his presentation at Collab Summit, we are building a sense of belonging, because belonging to and being part of a larger group resonates deeply with our mental firmware. We are fulfilling our internal destinies as social animals.

[Parts of this post were previously published on Jeff’s Open Source Resource, but there are some new bits too! Prizes available for spotting the differences.]

I attended and presented at the 2009 Embedded Linux Conference and the 2009 Linux Collaboration Summit. The conferences were co-located at the Kabuki Hotel in San Francisco, CA. Both conferences were extremely useful individually, but the combination of the two was absolutely electric.

At ELC, I attended some fantastic sessions, beginning with Dirk Hohndel’s keynote on ubiquitous Linux—very appropriate for an embedded conference, as much of the ubiquity he described is manifested from the embedded systems space. Cell phones and the networks that drive them, all of the multiple layers of networking equipment around us, the search engines and bookstores and LOLcats we hit every day, all are driven by Linux, largely by embedded Linux. His theoretical challenge was to go for a certain amount of time in the modern world without touching Linux, which very shortly led to not being able to even cross the street in many large cities.

The rest of the conference was full of fascinating information. I attended a presentation on Maemo, a keynote by embedded maintainer David Woodhouse, a great talk by embedded luminary Jim Ready, a fascinating discussion by David Mandala from Ubuntu on how they got such a large distro to work well in an ARM environment, and an extremely interesting panel hosted by Tim Bird and featuring Matt Mackall, Jon Corbet, and David Woodhouse. Tuesday evening provided a showcase of demos, including my demo of Meld running in Firefox, on Montabello, on a Beagle Board.

Wednesday was a rough one, because it was the day the two conferences overlapped. It was quite odd to wake up to find the population in the hotel’s conference area quadrupled, quite literally, and the rooms were physically changed around to accommodate all of the new conferencegoers. I didn’t get a chance to see many of the remaining ELC technical talks because I was riveted by the Collaboration Summit keynotes, most of which addressed community either directly or indirectly. I also managed to meet several community leaders, including Karsten Wade, Joe Brockmeier, and Jono Bacon. As a newcomer to community management, I found all of them welcoming, open, and filled with advice about community-building. The advice itself was worth the price of the trip—they gave me a lot to think about, particularly Karsten, whose role with the Fedora community is probably most similar to mine in the embedded space.

I gave my ELC presentation Wednesday as well, and was pleased to see some participation despite being opposite a very compelling panel featuring representatives from Sun, Microsoft, and the Linux Foundation. Note that Free Electrons recorded all of the sessions at ELC, including mine, so I expect to see those online in the coming weeks. Well done again, guys, and great to meet you in person!

The Linux Collaboration Summit is normally an invitation-only affair. This year, however, they invited all ELC members to stay for the remaining two days and participate. Thursday and Friday were simply a blur of packed sessions, including one that Joerg Bertholdt, VP Mktg at MontaVista, and I gave during the Community Best Practices track on Friday morning. The attendees were mostly community managers and active members, and we had a lively discussion about community and its role in product development and commericalization as well as some details about Meld itself. Our slides are available for anyone who would like them.

I came home exhausted on Friday afternoon, very grateful for such events and eager for more (after a rest!).

This excellent, well-written article (ok, full disclosure: I wrote it ) is on IBM’s developerWorks site. In their words:

Cloud computing isn’t just a server consideration. When you consider how ready the world is for pervasive clients — and how ready Linux is to accommodate — you’ll want to put your cloud plans on the front burner.

The article is at the top of the page here: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/
along with a lot of other excellent articles on Linux, though not necessarily embedded.

In case it has been bumped, here is a link directly to the article:
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-thin-client-cloud/index.html

This is only tangentially related to the material you will see in this space in the future, but it was way too funny to pass up:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/184618?sort=votes

When most people start new blogs, they usually delete the Hello world! post at the beginning. I like saying Hello to the world, though, so I’m keeping the title as an introduction.

So, Hello world! I’m Jeff. I have been a blogger for a little while, though most of the writing I have done over the past 18 years has been technical documentation in a variety of spaces. I have written for and contributed to the GNU project, documented products ranging from enterprise server software to cluster operating systems to microprocessor hardware, and performed a variety of other work directly or indirectly related to open-source software and embedded operating environments. I spent three years working on mobile Linux software before joining MontaVista last fall.

All of this makes me very happy to be here at MontaVista writing to you now. I have long been impressed with the work MontaVista has done in legitimizing and contributing to Linux as a viable embedded and real-time operating system, and I am pleased to be a part of the engineering team as a technical writer. I am even happier to be an ambassador for Meld, our new embedded Linux community, where I am an administrator.

That said, I feel that my primary role, both as a writer and as a community administrator, is as an advocate for developers, hence the name of this blog. I believe that openness and transparency are key to the intense success of open-source development, even in competitive arenas. MontaVista has proved itself to be so open to the needs of developers, and I will continue to work from the inside to keep it that way.

I am pleased to have the opportunity to share my thoughts with you in this space. Feel free to contact me at any time. I also attend and speak at open-source conferences whenever possible, so please say hi if you see me there.