The 2008 Utah Open Source Conference, to be held at Salt Lake Community College’s Redwood Campus August 28-30, 2008, will be a great opportunity for open source enthusiasts to gather, socialize, learn, and exchange ideas. In these ways, the 2008 UTOSC won’t be a lot different than the 2007 UTOSC. However, the planning and organizing team behind UTOSC 2008 does have some new and exciting changes for the 2008 conference.

In our previous blog posting, we described the theme the 2008 UTOSC is designed around: HOWTO. In this article, we’ll explain some of the ways we’re planning to abide by this theme.

Friends and Family

The 2008 UTOSC is designed to be more friendly to “newbies,” people who have only had a limited amount of exposure to the open source world, and to family members of those who eat, drink, sleep and roll around in open source every moment of their geeky lives.

Conference sessions on Friday, August 29, will include sessions targeted at those just getting their feet wet. Topics may include “Installing Linux,” “Using OpenOffice.org,” “Introduction to open source social networking tools,” and “Understanding SSH.”

The planning and organizing committee is excited about getting family members involved in what would ordinarily be considered fairly exclusive to geeks. There will be plenty of activities and conference sessions Saturday, August 30 targeting children and significant others so they can learn how open source may benefit them. We’ll have games and educational software for the kids like SuperTuxCart, SuperTux, Planet Penguin Racer, Gcompris, and KDEEDU. Session topics may include “Open source digital scrapbooking,” “Open source for the musician and music enthusiast,” “Open source and family history,” and “Open source artistry.” Great fun for the entire family!

To make this happen, admission on Saturday will be free to those who attend with a registered conference attendee.

Bar what?

Earlier this year, Utah Open Source Foundation (UTOSF) Head Cheese, Clint Savage, attended FUDCon, a conference for users and developers of the Fedora Linux distribution. One of the days of this conference was set up as a BarCamp, where attendees meet at the beginning of the day and decide, as a group, what conference topics and activities will take place that day. The BarCamp process is fairly informal, but there is one rule: Every attendee has to participate either by presenting or facilitating in at least one session.

Clint was totally amazed by this process and said it was one of the most satisfying conference experiences he’s had. He vowed that the 2008 Utah Open Source Conference would include one day of BarCamp. As a result, Thursday, August 28, the first day of the conference, will be held BarCamp-style. Be sure to show up early so you can participate in the entire process.

What now?

We’ll be posting more information in the days and weeks to come with more information about UTOSC 2008 including a Call For Papers and a Call For Volunteers. If you haven’t already, start thinking of topics you could present at this year’s conference with the above information in mind. Because this conference caters to a very diverse audience of varying levels of experience using open source or even using computers, nobody should feel they don’t have something to contribute.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, February 9th, 2008 at 8:55 am and is filed under Community, Conference. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.