FLOSS Manuals table
Anne Gentle and I staffed a vendor table for FLOSS Manuals, at which we gave away stickers and sold books that were written through FLOSS Manuals. Anne had planned to set up some FM books on Amazon CreateSpace to print and take to sell at TXLF. However, that didn't get ironed out in time, so she had copies made at a local print shop instead. More expensive per copy, but actually ready in time for the Fest. She also got a roll of 500 stickers printed, to give away. (Many thanks to Anne for getting all that stuff printed!)Our table was at the back of the vendor space, near the ladies' room. That was convenient for us, and didn't seem to reduce the traffic to the table. We got lots of interest at the table, with a number of people saying "I had no idea such a thing existed". So we have definitely spread the word.
Presentations
Anne and I gave a presentation about FLOSS Manuals, highlighting how it can help open source projects address their documentation needs. Anne has put the slides on Slideshare.
I gave another talk with David Cramer about how non-programmers can contribute to open source projects. We changed the title after the programs had been printed to "Collaborating with Non-programmers", which sounds less one-sided than the original title.
I didn't attend many of the other talks during the Fest, as I was staffing the table. I saw the first part of Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier's opening keynote, "A Musical Guide to the Future of Linux", in which he compared various operating systems and Linux distributions to music bands. Unfortunately, I had to go set up for my talk with Anne, so I didn't hear the end, in which he explained how Linux itself could become less like the Ramones, and more like the Beatles.
I also saw Amber Graner's talk on her experiences as an "NTEU" (non-technical end user) of Ubuntu. Amber may be non-technical, but she is nonetheless a geek (that is, one who combines intelligence and obsession). She dove into the Ubuntu community headfirst, and a year and a bit later is a team leader of a local ("LoCo") Ubuntu group and of the Ubuntu Women Project, a blogger for Ubuntu User magazine, and an editor for Ubuntu Weekly News. She has also been to at least six Linux, Ubuntu, or open source conferences or events. She's certainly proof positive that there can be space for non-technical folks in open source. Non-obsessed folks, that's another question.
The closing keynote was by Randal Swartz. It highlighted many of the same points as David's and my talk about ways to contribute to open source other than programming. However, his talk had more personal examples and anecdotes about Larry Wall, Linus Torvalds, and Richard Stallman.
Firefox mini-sprint
I skipped the post-Fest pub crawl on 6th Street, though I did go to dinner at Chuy's, organized by Joe Cooper of Webmin. Our group gradually grew from about six to about two dozen, such that we didn't get seated until after 9pm. It was a nice chance to talk to an assortment of attendees from the Fest, including some fellow IBMers.I was glad, then, that I hadn't scheduled the Firefox sprint to start until 11am on Sunday. The idea of doing a mini-sprint after TXLF came from Joe Brockmeier, who gave the opening keynote. He's a technology journalist and until recently was a community manager for openSUSE. I picked the Firefox update as a smallish chunk of work that could potentially be done in a day.
I announced the sprint on the FLOSS Manuals discussion list, on my blog, on the TXLF mailing list, and on the Mozilla Support Contributors Forum. Zonker mentioned it during his keynote, and I had mini-flyers at the FM table with the
details. I had no idea who would show up besides Zonker and me.
We had two additional people come to the coffeehouse to help with the sprint, and two remote contributors. I got email from one person who looked for us at the coffeehouse and didn't see us :-( and there was one person who came to hang out and sprint on a different project (I had extended that invitation in the TXLF announcements).
I didn't have much time to prepare for the sprint, since I was also preparing for my talks. So my first task during the sprint was to go through the list of new features in Firefox 3.6 and identify where that info needed to be added to the FM manual. I found about 15 tasks. By the end of the sprint on Sunday, about one third of those had been completed.
So, there is more work to do before the Firefox manual is up to date. If you're interested, please take a look at the previous post to see how to get started. Then look at the ScratchNotes page, pick something to update, and then mark it done when you're done.
I think the sprint worked out reasonably well, given that it was organized at pretty much the last minute (e.g., after out-of-towners had made their travel plans). With more advance notice, we might have gotten more people. But at least a few people got a chance to try out the FLOSS Manuals tools and process.