I attended FOSDEM 2007 this week-end. It was my first time there, it’s really a great event. It looks a bit like a system at the edge of chaos… but it self-organizes correctly. There’s always something happening because of an insane amount of talks. It’s even a bit frustrating at times because you definitely can attend only a few talks. Which means you have to choose very carefully… I admit I was disappointed by two really bad talks but no big deal.
Particularly interesting was the OpenMoko talk. I’d say it’s nothing ground breaking on the technical side, but it looks great from a business model perspective… Definitely looks like a tempting cell phone for hackers. :-)
Also amazing was the attendance during the KDE 4 talk. The room was just full, it was difficult to find a seat. Jos Poortvliet did a very good job at summarizing the current state of the matter. Keep up the good work Jos!
Apart from the talks, FOSDEM has proven to be just great for socializing. It’s great to meet known friends again, to put faces on people you only know from IRC or mail, and new people. That’s probably the best advantage of FOSDEM, a lot of different projects are present there, so it’s really easy to discuss with them. The cross-desktop and education sessions just showed it.