Yesterday was my last day at GUADEC 2013 – I’m heading back to Ohio now, after an amazing week. All of the talks I attended were great, though a few really stand out, as always. I especially enjoyed Matt Dalios keynote about Endless Mobile and what they’re doing to bring computers & learning to the world. He had some great ideas – one of which I would love – the ability to download updates to a USB stick, take them home and update your computer. I also really loved Stef Walter’s talk ‘More secure with less “security” about how we can shift some of the control away from users in order to make all of our systems more secure.
Of course, there were many talks that I missed, while attending other things and which make me wish I had a clone – Allan Day’s and Ekaterina Gerasimova & Sindu Sundar’s come to mind. This year though, there is a bright side! For the first time, all of the talks were filmed and will be online sometime in the next few days/weeks. I’m sure I’m not the only one anxious to see all the great talks that I missed – and maybe rewatch others as well.
I was happily surprised at how well the Marketing Hackfest was attended – I had expected it to just be our usual group of a dozen or so folks and was very happy to see others taking an interest. We were finally able to agree on a name change that better reflects what we do – and are now the Engagement Team. We also talked about how we can better inform the press, promote our outreach efforts and
Of course, GUADEC is about more than just the presentations, hackfests & Bof’s. It’s also about getting to meet fellow GNOMErs, and interacting in person with the people we all talk to on a daily basis throughout the rest of the year. Meeting each other in person helps to remind us all that there are real people behind all the screen names, and in so doing, helps remind us to be kind and understanding to one another – sometimes sarcasm is hard to spot online. 🙂
Finally, I’d like to give a couple of shout outs of thanks – first to the local GUADEC team who did a fanastic job organizing the conference. Everything from the buildings to the social events in the evening was wonderful. Second to the GNOME Foundation in thinaks for sponsoring me on the trip. And, finally, a huge thank you to Jasper St Pierre for fixing my computer when gdm broke yesterday. 🙂
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