Community-cation: A Look Back at Week 41, 2008

A lot of work has been done behind the scenes this week for the End User Summit in New York next week. Thanks to the talented people working on the show, I think it will be an excellent event. This is not, mind you, self-promotion--they've put me in charge of the slide shows, which shows my co-workers know how to best utilize me. :)

I am looking forward to Stephen O'Grady's panel on "Participation and Process within the Linux Community: Do we have an End User Problem?," the latest Linux Weather Forecast from Jon Corbet, and Bernard Golden's talk on Enterprise Adoption of Open Source Trends and Patterns. But, honestly, picking and choosing between the talks on isn't going to be easy.

The Summit is just one show amongst many in the pantheon of Linux-related shows that happen throughout the year. The Indiana LinuxFest is going on today down in Bloomington, and the Ohio LinuxFest is happening this weekend over in Columbus. There is no shortage of Linux shows in the world, but this week we saw a big change for the biggest one, as LinuxWorld is now changed to OpenSource World. You can read my last blog entry for my thoughts on the new show, but suffice to say, I think people will be surprised at the outcome.

Somebody asked me this week if shows like ours and the other events are really going to be successful, particularly in these very troubled times. Will people want to attend when travel expenses might be tight? Isn't show attendance just a luxury? I suppose it all depends on how bad things get. It is a given that here in the US, we're entering (or have entered) a recession. Companies will be cutting back quite a bit, and yes, I think that means that overall show attendance will be reduced.

But there's a particular effect of bad economic times that also effects shows and conferences: when more professionals find themselves in shakier professional circumstances or (goodness forbid) actually out of a job, events serve as excellent places to get trained up in new skils and to network with potential new employers. Since Linux already has a strong sense of community, I think this effect will be even stronger.

Also, there are a lot of folks--including our head honcho--who believe that Linux is just the ticket to help companies trim back their IT costs. Obviously, we always thought it was, but the recent stock and credit crisis has made a lot of people get out of their proprietary comfort zones and start really looking at other solutions. Like Linux.

It's pretty sad to say that it takes a big crisis like this to whack people across the head and make them consider a solution that's been sitting there the whole time. That's mostly human nature, I guess. I need to fix that drippy faucet in the master bathroom, but it's going to take a couple of days, I'll bet, for me to get to it. It's not so bad now, I think to myself, and I have other things to do. It will likely take either a complete breakdown of the faucet or a force of nature (re: my wife) to prompt me to get out of my self-composed comfort zone to actually fix it.

Now, it seems, we are in the midst of a force of financial nature, and it's time to wait out this storm. And to repeat a warning I hear every year in tornado season: make sure you stay away from the Windows.