Ohio
Linux Fest was a blast this year. The Expo Hall was busy and packed
with geeky awesomeness. I met a bunch of fabulous people and had some
excellent conversations with customers and other Ubuntu fans. I've
made my way through a number of conferences this past year and
OLF2013 had more System76 customers than any other conference. It was
fun to meet customers face to face after having ongoing conversations
with them through the order queue as well as connecting through
social networks. It was the first conference I've been to where I
wasn't completely surrounded by MAC laptops, which was an awesome
sight for me.
I
wasn't able to attend any talks or classes because Ian and I were
running the booth in the Expo Hall. I'm fine with that though,
because most of it seemed overly technical for my liking and I love
running the System76 booth and talking about our computers.
Our
booth was packed when we put the games on the Galago UltraPro. Nobody
could believe that it was running on Intel Graphics. We had quite the
crowd the majority of the time.
I
was impressed by the convention center in Ohio and loved all the
amenities and the fact that it was physically connected to our Hotel.
The Ohio Convention Center is HUGE. The convenient store on location
had everything I could've imagined. If you forget something, it's OK
because you'll be able to find it at the convenient store. I hate
being in a random city without contact solution and hair mousse...
glad the trip worked out in my favor :)
The
highlight of Ohio Linux Fest was meeting our partners from Project:
Community Computers. Jeff and Garrick shared their passion for
spreading technology to communities in need and it was really
heartwarming and exciting to know that we have an opportunity to help
them out. I'm personally excited to continue promoting their work and
can't wait to see how their next Ubuntu lab deployment goes. They are
headed to Sierra Leone in November to set up a lab at a University
with 40 computers running Ubuntu.
 |
| Emma with Jeff and Garrick from Project: Community Computers |
I
connected Project: CC with Jono, so hopefully we can both use our
social networks to their advantage and achieve maximum social spread.
They work so hard and are doing an incredible job spreading Ubuntu. I
can't wait to watch their success.
The
best part of every conference is the people. Face time is valuable
and I don't think you can really see someone's passion for a project
without it. Face time in the community is an extremely valuable tool
to help spread any idea and I highly recommend attending conferences
to achieve that.