[lug] Off-Topic (a bit): Conferences and Trade Shows

[Michael J. Hammel]

On Wed, 2009-11-04 at 18:20 -0700, Jonathan Corbet wrote:
> It's OpenSourceWorld now, and it was a flop.

Good to know.  I trust your opinion.  It's off the list.

> If you want something in the US, LinuxCon is as good as it gets.

I wanted to go this year but my wife and I took our first vacation in 4
years instead.  I'll put this one on the list.

> That and the Linux Plumbers Conference for a more
> development-oriented event.  Both are happening in Boston next fall.
> The LF collaboration summit in the Spring might also be of interest.

The latter looks interesting in that the Storage and Filesystem workshop
is co-located with it.

> How far afield do you want to go?  FOSDEM is a good
> development-oriented event in Brussels.  

I've got the okay to go outside the US but I'm not sure there are many
I'm that interested in.

> For exposing products and
> such, you can't beat CeBit in Germany; 

That's one.  We need to hit up some IT related shows and that's the
biggie.

> linux.conf.au is a great development
> conference.  

Another I'd like to attend but without an expo (trade show) its probably
not worth it for us.

> The Embedded Linux Conference is good for embedded stuff.

This might be good too.  Depends on location.  I'll look it up.

> Depending on who your customers are, you might want to consider
> something like the Red Hat summit.  LinuxSymposium is supposed to be in
> Vancouver next year, but I think that's a fading event.

Currently our customers are DoD/Homeland Security/gov't related.  I'm
trying to extend this to non-gov't clients.  We have various hardware
products (many related to radar systems and realtime data acquisition)
but also have software products related to grids, clouds and social
networking.

I'm also trying to get more involved in various development areas -
think of it as a mid-life crisis for nerds:  gotta get into the latest
technologies at all levels of the SW stack.  I'm enjoying my career
again cuz I get to code, and pick a lot of what we develop.  I'm trying
to get us more into mobile solutions in both hardware and software:
WiMax, Android, etc.

So I'm looking for conference w/expos primarily, but not exclusively.
I'm also interested in conferences or places our business devel people
can make some contacts too.

> If you have more specific questions - or guidance on just what kind of
> event interests you - drop me a line.  Suffice to say I've seen my
> share of these things...

Yeah, I still envy how you get to stay so involved.  The closest I get
these days is writing articles.

If you have more suggestions, do pass them my way.  Thanks!
-- 
Michael J. Hammel                               
mjhammel at graphics-muse.org / http://www.graphics-muse.org
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Pessimism:  Every dark cloud has a silver lining, but lightning kills
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