ericb's place

Some words about Fosdem 2008

A bit late, but better than never, some words about FOSDEM 2008.

I had to attend by car. Arrived on friday at 16:30, I found my hotel at 17:20. Not so bad using a map of buses and metro :-) Good point: the hotel was very well located, and attend FOSDEM was very easy. The bad point is the 5 euros Guiness near the hotel because it was to close the the European thing..

The beer event.

Simple: 20 euros and you can get 6 beers. I prefered pay only 2 , 'cause my capacity is not enough important ;-) Was impressive: full of people, and I only found 4 people I knew the name. And on saturday, a lot of people I never found told me they were there .. :-)

Now the FOSDEM : more people this year than last year, this is obvious. Even in the AW building, a bit outside of the main building, rooms were full of people !

Was a pleasure to meet Catalan Team, means Jesus Corrius and a big part of the OOoCon 2007 Team (Barcelona), lot of people I often see on IRC, and of course, the OpenOffice.org Team.

Sophie Gautier was mainly managing the booth, helped successively by Leo Moons, Jesus Corrius, Luis Suarez Potts and Simon Brouwer (please tell me if I forgot someone).

Nice to meet a lot of people I only saw the name on OOo mailing lists (like Leo Moons, Berend Cornelius Simon Brouwer and Michael Bohn .. and other ).

Saturday was fine: Stephan Bergmann , Thorsten Behrens and Juergen Schmidt presentations were great. After that, the "Restaubiere" ( Rue des renards Bruxelles ) was choosen for the dinner :





The Restaubieres-Team :




(Louis Suarez Potts, attended too, but is not on the photo, because he arrived afterwards)

Sunday : after a very good workshop from Eike Rathke about Calc, it was my turn. The room was full, and I was glad to see Fridrich Strba( multilinguist, joke expert, and to be invited if you want to have Fun in a party. Can help for svg and wp filter thing sometimes ... ), Rene Engelhard and some other join the presentation. They even answered to some specific questions ( about configure e.g. with Rene).

Was too short ( as always).

After, was the time to the return: a fast goodbye ( sorry for the one I missed) and bakc in the car for a 5 hours run through Bruxelles first ( where is the highway ? :-) ), Luxembourg and France.

Like Jurgen Schmidt and Luis Suarez Potts (but other agreed), my conclusion about FOSDEM is simple: FOSDEM IS the place for OpenOffice.org developers, and I strongly invite people to join next year, for FOSDEM2009. OpenOffice.org Project must be preent to answer questions.

Last but not least, mainly two sort of people attend: some are students, and don't know well the project. Other have high level skills, and are profesional of code ( but do not represent the majority).

Hope to attend the next one ;-)

publié par ericb @ vendredi, février 29, 2008

See you in Bruxelles :)

Like other OpenOffice.org volunteers, I'll attend (second time for me), the FOSDEM 2008.

I'll do my best to present a workshop about "Hack OpenOffice.org" for people having programming skills and discovering the project. The workshop will be made on Mac OS X, using the aqua version.

Don't forget I'll represent the Education Project, and I'll be glad to -try to- answer questions.

e.g. skilled students interested to contribute for OpenOffice.org source code, are welcome to contact me. The idea is to propose applications with Schools (for a peer student /prof) around OpenOffice.org source code and issues.

As example, see: Math baseline alignement

For other possible applications, see : Education Project Effort



P.S. for french people living in French County: I'm using my car to attend, and if you are on the way, we can share the travel. ( departure : friday morning, return sunday evening )

just contact me .. ericb@openffice.org

publié par ericb @ mardi, février 19, 2008

Solutions Linux 2008 (Paris)

Thanks to Jean-Pierre Archambault ( Mission Veille Technologique / SCEREN / CNDP / CRDP Paris), to have invited OpenOffice.org during Solution Linux 2008 (Paris).



From right to left: Jean-Francois Tissoires ( CRDP Lyon), Edith Vigna(Lycee Leonard de Vinci, Melun), Jaques Souillot (CRDP Paris, second rank), Estelle Ferlay (CRDP Paris), me (OpenOffice.org Education Project).

Missing : Frederic Varni ( Lycee Leonard de Vinci, Melun )





From left to right : first rank : Edith Vigna(Lycee Leonard de Vinci, Melun),Nicolas Jeudy( OpenOffice.org ). Second rank : Jean-Pierre Archambault, me


Was the occasion to meet for true, lot of actors for free software use in French Education.

An abstract of the Education Topic is available here (french only)

As teacher myself, and French Education member, I can say the conf was excellent (I never annoyed myself !), and I have discovered very interesting tools, and solutions using free software in French Education Nationale.

An example, particulary interested me: was about mix students, teachers, documentalist, and network admin to discuss and research the best solution. Quite interesting, and very interesting questions too. Glad to have discussed (a lot as usual ) with Roberto Di Cosmo, always impressive :-)

Last but not least, I learned that Free software, when compared to propriatory software, take the advantage, because of soupleness and response time when a problem or whatever occurs.

publié par ericb @ vendredi, février 01, 2008