Planning my SCALE 6x Attendance
In about a week, I'll be heading down to Los Angeles to participate in SCALE 6x, the sixth annual Southern California Linux Expo. In addition to visiting the event, I'll be giving my Age of Literate Machines presentation, updated for 2008 and supported by more research. I'll be joining another Mozillion - Chris Blizzard, who will be giving a talk on Firefox on Linux - as well as Perl hacker Allison Randal, Open Source wrangler Danese Cooper, Postgresql evangelist Josh Berkus, BSD advocate and fellow Canadian Dru Lavigne, Ubuntu evangelist and fellow metalhead Jono Bacon, and a host of other interesting folks.In keeping with my post about getting the most from conference attendance, I'm blogged my rough participation plan for the event.
Getting there
I'm going to fly down to San Francisco, go help Julian on the Human Creativity Project, visit the Mozilla Corp. offices in Mountain View and then drive down to LA with a friend who is also attending SCALE. He's canceling his flight now that he has someone to drive with, which is a bonus. I'll also have a few good hours of talking time with my friend, which is another nice bonus.Staying thereThe public transit in LA is not good. I'll likely share a hotel room with a friend or try to mooch a couch spot with a local who is driving to the event.
Making the most of the area and time
I'm going to look for interesting people to meet and useful things to do using the following resources.
- I'll scan the list of SCALE exhibitors, speakers and sponsors, keeping an eye out for people who may have shared interests or relevant needs. I try to start looking at the conference participant lists first, as it helps attendees and sponsors get value from their participation.
- I'll search the Confabb database for events in LA before, during and after SCALE. (Hrm. I think that I'll pass on the 2008 Paint and Coating Exposition.)
- Resources like Dopplr's LA page, Meetup's listings for Internet and Technology groups in LA, the BarCamp LA site and so on, will help me find people and groups who should care about or be interested in the Mozilla Manifesto, Free Software/Open Source and the electronic frontier.
- Other things that I'll do include:
- Writing to my publishers to see if they'll have someone visiting the event
- Chatting to Mozilla's PR team to make sure that I'm synced up with other Mozilla participants
- Writing the people and groups I find to see if we can arrange meetings, share ideas, etc.
- Digging around for relevant broadcasters – bloggers, radios shows, speciality TV shows, etc.
Goals
Meeting people, giving presentations and so on is all well and good – however, the effect of these activities can be rather hard to measure. Here is a rough list of concrete things that I'd like to get out of my SCALE participation:
- Identify five potential Mozilla Foundation grant recipients. (For the curious, Frank Hecker has posted a summary of the grants the Foundation made in 2007.)
- Find three organizations willing to match some or all of our grants for a specific project or set of projects.
- Find three organizations who we can help implement (or improve their implementation) of some or all of the principles of the Mozilla Manifesto. Good candidates for this include non-profit associations and teaching organizations.
- Speak to one non-technical group about the importance of a free and open web.
That's about it for this stage. As I get more info, I'll try to blog more. I'll certainly blog more once I get down to the event.
Link Summary
- http://www.socallinuxexpo.org/scale6x/
- http://www.socallinuxexpo.org
- http://www.socallinux...Christopher-Blizzard/
- http://www.socallinux...eakers/Allison-Randal
- http://www.socallinux...peakers/Danese-Cooper
- http://www.socallinux.../speakers/Josh-Berkus
- http://www.socallinux.../speakers/Dru-Lavigne
- http://www.socallinux...o/speakers/Jono-Bacon
- http://www.humancreativity.com/
- http://mozilla.com
- http://www.socallinux...nce-info/exhibitions/
- http://www.socallinux...erence-info/speakers/
- http://www.socallinux...erence-info/sponsors/
- http://confabb.com
- http://confabb.com/se...;cat=&to=20080212
- http://www.dopplr.com/place/us/ca/los-angeles
- http://meetup.com
- http://www.meetup.com...rnet-&-Technology
- http://barcampla.org/
- http://www.mozilla.or...ozilla-manifesto.html
- http://www.mozillafoundation.org/
- http://hecker.org/moz...oundation-grants-2007
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Posted on Friday, February 1st, 2008 at 13:15
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February 2nd, 2008 at 17:35
Zak,
Looking forward to seeing you at SCALE. Enjoy your trip down!
February 3rd, 2008 at 20:24
Thanks Gareth! I really enjoyed the show back in 2002,
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