oSC13 is over, but there are more to come, join us.

openSUSE Conference is officially over. We did our best and it worked. I hope all of you had fun although I know that most of you did. There are no words of how gratefull I am to all of those people that helped for this to become a reality.
You can find all the talks in this YouTube playlist. If you have any more photos and you want to share please send them to me, I lost most of the conference trying to make it happen so I would like to see every minute.

More to come...

For those of you who lost oSC13 and for those who want to do it again, no worries openSUSE Summit is comming, join us there and have fun. I will come back with more information about it soon. I need to sleep a few days before doing that :D

oSC14 is around the corner...

Yeap oSC14 is comming on April so get ready for even more fun to Dubrovnik, Croatia. Another Great team of volunteers and Free software activists are ready to host us and rock our brains out. Also one of the things I will come back later with more details.

Bottom line

Community works and it can make anything happen, all it needs is people to stand up and do things, so simple. Stop complaining about stuff, stop talking about stuff, just stand up and make things happen. We are the openSUSE community and we are evolving.

Organizing oSC13 - 2 days before(Zero hour)

Well we are practically on day zero. All the core volunteers are now here, and final set up and testing is doing and every hour counts. Huge efforts are becoming from all people around and all people working in the same spot make this one huge hackfest, saving precious time. Preparation for this conference was huge and this is 'show time' for us. The dark spot here is that no matter how we tried, no matter how personal time we dedicated and no matter how tired we are, nothing of that will actually matter if we do not deliver the best  openSUSE conference done.
 To be honest this whole thing surely did not started how I wanted and did not continued as I wanted. I hoped for more help from people, and this is 'my' people. Unfortunately many people were not sure for us taking the conference and many people that said will help were just vanished from the face of the earth after we finally got the conference.
On the other hand help came from unexpected places, faith to the broader community paid off and Stella and Henne turned out to have super powers. I am a very lucky guy I'm telling you...

I don't want to jinx it but if this conference goes the way it should then this will be a great 'fuck off' to all those people. This years oSC team finally made it and delivered what promised to the community.

I am not sure if I will have another actual post until the conference starts(I am planning to post some preparation photos along with comments :P ) so for those coming to this years openSUSE Conference, make things that matter, have a lot of fun and drink like there is no tommorow.
For those who won't come all I will say is that you will lose an once in a life time experience.

Organizing oSC13 - 13 days before(A morning inside my head)

Less than two weeks left. OMG it's getting closer.

Here in Thessaloniki it almost started. As in 3 days from now we will be at the conference testing the network, start setting up the rooms and getting the whole venue ready to accept the 350 to 500 guests and the 50+ volunteers. Not much things are left in their fate those last days. So far we were on a marathon, now we are going on a sprint... After the marathon...

Of course have in mind just in case you decide to organize a conference that luck is not on your side amazing things can go wrong and affect your work. Like, let's see... Having a network upgrade in your neighbor and have no internet for the next 5 days...Without a previous warning from your provider... What are the chances for that?  Luckily I have a great girlfriend who lets me stay at her place and use her internet.

Waiting for the conference to start made me think how I got here. I mean it is interesting how I got into this. No I am not gong to tell you that story, at least not tonight, you will be bored to death, or not :D

The last couple of days I am on to checklists. Me along with Stella and Henne are checking again and again what was done,what was not done and what is left behind and needs a boosting. The thing is that things are going better than even I originally have calculated. Having people like Carlos, Juergen and Jos onto doing things is simply a miracle producing machine. Let's hope that by the end of the Conference they will still want to talk to me :P

Today I remembered that I have a presentation about oSC13 in oSC13. I would like to find some time and prepare that at some point but my guess is that this will be done just a few hours before the talk. Don't get me wrong, I love making presentations, I just hate preparing them. The good thing with that particular presentation is that I know the talk, I just need the slides for it,mmmm

In a while I have a meeting, with 13 days to go I calculate than I have less than 10 meetings to go before the conference, yeaaaaaaah.

Organizing oSC13 - 16 days before

So here we are 2 days and 2 weeks before the conference starts. One part of myself is finding it hard to believe that we are close to the end of preparation and so close to the start of the conference. Those days I find myself singing "Nothing else matters" from Metallica every few minutes. I mean really the first turn seem to me it is written for the state I am on those days :

So close, no matter how far
Couldn't be much more from the heart
Forever trusting who we are
And nothing else matters

It is those last days before the conference that let you know what you are made of. New people comming, some people canceling, suddently companies and organizations woke up and want to be a part of it but there is no way to make this work, finalizing everything is a do or die situation... Not a walk in the park I would say. 

The good thing is that I see task on trello moving from doing to done really fast and that calms me down. I am a bit angry because I wanted to be at this years aKademy but again I cannot due to the conference, I promised myself(again) that next year I will be there, lets see. 

Deadlines are over one by one fast, but for some reason this is relieving since it means fewer things to be done. I hope that next week will be the calmer of all in that almost 9 month period that we work for the conference, my other half of the organization team, Stella things that I am wrong but we will know that in a few days. It is not that I could use a calm week, it's been so long since I started working for 16/24 7/7 for the conference that I am not sure I know what to do with that 'Free' time. Ok I honestly hope my girlfriend doesn't read that particular post :D

In the end of all one thing is for sure, this is the most crucial week of the period, if something goes wrong this week the changes to make it right are very few, but it won't, I planned the whole damn thing this way, lol...