• Are you planning on coming to the Utah Open Source Conference 2009?  Are you thinking about it?  Have you been considering it, but aren’t sure?  Well, now is the time, before prices go up!  Save 30% with Early Bird rates before Sept 26!!

    What you will be missing if you decide not to attend UTOSC 2009 is an amazing list of keynotes, presentations, events and much, much more.  Here’s just a sampling of some of the things we have in store for you.

    Community Day – October 8, 2009

    At 8am, before even the conference is happening is the great CTO Breakfast with your favorite host, Phil Windley.  This event is free for anyone to attend.  Don’t miss out!  It will be held at the cafeteria, just west of the Miller Free Enterprise Center.

    UTOSC 2009 has a great keynote in Daren Brabham from right here in Utah.  Every year, we have at least one local keynote to present something they are passionately interested in talking with our conference attendees.  Crowdsourcing is Daren’s interest, he’s been working on it for some time!

    Several Local User Groups and Birds of a Feather sessions are taking place, and we’ve still got a few things up our sleeve!!  Come see presentations on Machine Learning, Virtual Machines and more!

    At the end of the day, we have Ignite Salt Lake 3.5 with some really great presentations, another free community event, but you need to registerCheck out the presenters for this awesome event!

    Geek Day – October 9, 2009

    Starting off with our keynote, Stormy Peters from the GNOME Foundation, all through the day is about the presentations.  We have presentations for everyone.  From very technical for the programmer and system administrator to fun and entertaining presentations, this day is full of goodness.

    At the end of the day, we have the GPG Keysigning BoF which will be lots of fun.  Make sure to bring your GPG key or read up how to generate one!

    Geek Dinner – Spaghetti Mama’s

    After all of the presentations and activities on Friday, we’ll head on over to Spaghetti Mama‘s for the Geek Dinner at 8pm.  The entire community is invited, so come on over and enjoy pizza and pasta with your friends and community.  It should be a great party!

    Family Day – October 10, 2009

    As we did in 2008, from 10am-2pm on Saturday, we’re going to be making a very special effort around families.  If you have registered for a Full Access Pass, we invite you to bring your family for the Family related activities and presentations.  We have presentations on GIMP (photo-editiing), setting up computers for kids to use as well as some activities like a GPS treasure hunt and a family oriented Try-It Lab workshop.  Family members need not register to attend on Saturday, just show up and have some fun!

    Don’t forget to attend Dave McAllister’s keynote on Open Source and Adobe.  This presentation promises to be ground breaking in every way.  Now that Adobe will own a local company in Omniture, there are definitely some good vibes coming through.

    Come for a Pizza Party, sponsored by openSUSE

    In addition to all the activities we have scheduled for Family Day, the folks over at openSUSE have pitched in a ton of pizza and drinks.  Starting at about 11:45am until about 1pm, there will be pizza available for everyone at the conference, though it is first come, first served.  Come and grab a slice and share a conversation with family and friends.

    As the Utah Open Source Conference winds down around 7pm, we’ll be setting up the boardgames to play.  We’ve got quite a few games available, and you can bring your own as well.  We’ll probably get to play as late as we like, so come on by and enjoy a nice relaxing game of Settlers of Catan, Carcassone or Perudo while discussing the weekends activities and fun!

    See you all in just a couple of weeks.

    Cheers,

    Clint

    Posted on September 23, 2009 to:

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  • So you’ve been very patient, and we appreciate it very much!

    But wait no more!  The speaker list for the Utah Open Source Conference is here!  There are over 45 speakers and 50+ presentations on this amazing list, visit it today to see if your favorites are there!!  You can also see the speakers in several ways, including by category; like Keynote, or by audience, like Beginner, or by Room or by Date.   We’re still working on the full fledged printable magic schedule that lets you imagine the presentations you want to attend and creates the presentations in that exact order, but we’re working on it!

    Please take a moment and share this with your friends, family, neighbors, puppies, kitty cats, and llamas!

    Everyone should know about the amazing presentations at the Utah Open Source Conference 2009!  I’m excited for several, and we’ve got some killer Keynotes including Stormy Peters from the GNOME Foundation and Dave McAllister from Adobe.

    We have activities that will excite and encourage!

    This year we have revamped the Try-It lab from last year, with workshops throughout the weekend..  These workshops will be scheduled for 2-3 hours and will be hands-on.  But don’t worry, there’s also ample opportunity to come and try out different distributions, applications and other items during the unscheduled time of the Try-It Lab!

    Birds of a Feather really do flock together!

    In 2007, we had a few successful BoFs (Birds of a Feather) sessions, including GPG keysigning and the Boardgame BoF.  In an effort to develop a richer experience, we’re bringing the BoF back to UTOSC 2009.  We already have a few created, so feel free to find the board and add your BoF during UTOSC 2009.  (If you would like to pre-schedule a BoF, feel free to email feather@utos.org with your topic and we’ll get it added)

    LUGs are invited to share!

    Local User Groups are why we run UTOSC.  If you are part of a LUG in the Mountain West, we’ve reserved time for you to come and talk about your group.  Things like; when you meet, what topics you discuss would be good, plus the foodstuffs you serve (like ‘Punch and Pie’).  Plus, we’ve even made time for mini-LUG meetings right at UTOSC on Thursday, October 8.  For more information, email lugs@utos.org, spots are going fast!

    Wow, my hands are tired!

    There is so much more to share about UTOSC 2009, but I think my hands are cramping a little more than I like.  So for now, I’ll just say ‘You should go and register today! Keep in mind, if you are a member of a Local User Group in the Mountain West, your LUG will have a promo code worth 50% off admission, that’s quite a discount!

    Early Bird Registration ends September 19, so Visit http://attend.utosc.com to register today!

    See you all in October at UTOSC 2009!!!

    Posted on September 4, 2009 to:

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  • Hi all,

    It’s been a long time coming, but we’ve just rolled out some major changes to our utos-conman staging server tonight. I’d like to get everyone involved in testing these changes so we can roll them out to the live site (http://2009.utosc.com) by end of week.

    The changes are these:

    • Twitter functionality for updates
      • updates should be going to twitter.com/utostest, (because this is a sensitive feature and we don’t want too many messages going out to our live twitter feed, we’ve put the updates behind the /admin/ section, username/password: conman/conman).
    • Multiple presenters per presentation
      • this is issue #2 on the issue tracker and it looks to be working!
      • Utahcon has some prettyness he’ll be adding to the ajax and jquery stuff we did last week.
    • Our RSS feed of abstracts is getting better
      • UTOS-ConMan now has a byline and category displayed.

    and the biggest change…

    Migrations!!

    The nice thing about migrations is the ability to roll to any state within our database if something isn’t working. It also gives us snapshots in time of where we were with the database.

    We’re using South (http://south.aeracode.org) to do our migrations and boy is it nice! The tutorial can help get anyone up to speed.  Essentially, instead of using syncdb, we’ll be using South’s migrate.functionality.

    I wanted to thank all the folks who have helped us get this far, and a special thanks to Utahcon for his work as of late. We’re really making some good progress toward some awesome conference management software.

    Feel free to check out the code from our google code svn repositoryWE TAKE PATCHES!

    If you are interested in any other improvements for previous staging releases, please feel free to let me know.

    Cheers,

    Clint

  • UTOSC 2008 abstract submission has ended.  And while that part of the process is over, we now have the task of selecting presenters.  For those of you who have submitted presentations, or those in the community we’ve contacted, feel free to vote for your favorites in our digg style voting system.

    As mentioned before, login and click on the “SPEAKERS” link at the UTOSC 2008 website.  Vote for or against the presentations (or don’t vote for a presentation at all).  But hurry, because voting privileges are only good until July 10, 2008.

    On July 15, 2008, a tentative presentation schedule will be delivered.  In addition, because UTOSC 2008 has more presenters than we can possibly take, many presenters will be asked to be alternates. This selection date should give you almost 45 days to prepare your presentation.

    Don’t forget, registration is open as well, visit http://2008.utosc.com/ to register today.  If you haven’t already, contact your Local User Group for discount codes today.

    We hope to see you all at Utah Open Source Conference 2008.

    Cheers,

    Clint

    Posted on July 2, 2008 to:

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  • Another reminder for the Multi-Distro Release Party being held this coming Saturday. Ubuntu (Gutsy Gibbon), Fedora (Werewolf) and OpenSUSE (10.3) will be available via network install.

    Map: http://tinyurl.com/yprnqr
    When: Saturday, November 10, 2007 1pm-5pm MDT
    What: Installfest, pizza, drinks and more.

    Cheers,

    Clint Savage
    The Utah Open Source Foundation, Open Source for Utah, and the world!

  • Just a quick reminder that Saturday, November 10, from 1-5pm will be the Multi-Distro Release Party at the Open Source Technology Center at Novell. Ubuntu (GutsyGibbon), Fedora (Werewolf) and OpenSUSE (10.3) will be available via network install. Also, we’ll have a few short presentations about the three released distributions, food and a network install server for the Installfest.We hope to see you all there!

    Map: http://tinyurl.com/yprnqr
    When: Saturday, November 10, 2007 1pm-5pm MDT
    What: Installfest, pizza, drinks and more.

    Cheers,

    Clint Savage
    The Utah Open Source Foundation, helping Open Source grow in Utah

  • Only once in a great while will we see an event like this one. Only once will there be so many shiny new distributions to choose from. Only once will OpenSUSE, Ubuntu and Fedora be released within one month of each other.

    Because of this The Utah Open Source Foundation is announcing the first and probably only Multi-Distro Release Party in Utah. The release party will involve all three major distros, plus anyone is welcome to bring their own distro to hand out.

    The party will be held on Saturday, November 10, from 1-5pm at the Open Source Technology Center at Novell. We’ll have a few short presentations about the three released distributions, food and a large network install server for the Installfest.

    We hope to see you all there!

    Map: http://tinyurl.com/yprnqr
    When: Saturday, November 10, 2007 1pm-5pm MDT
    What: Installfest, pizza, drinks and more.

    Cheers,

    Clint Savage
    The Utah Open Source Foundation, Making Open Source better in Utah!