So, I’ve been in Brussels for three days now. Yesterday we had some pre-conference workshops, short introduction and it was kind of a warm-up for the staff, since we were only like twenty-thirty people. I attended a workshop on Processing by Dan from LUST – it was pretty cool. I didn’t do too much, nor I learned Processing (its a freaking programming language after all) but that wasn’t the point. I’ve been interested in the thing for quite some time, now I’m even more and I’ll actually try to learn it (I am actually going to write a separate post on the topic explaining why its important to me). Thanks, Dan, it was a good experience meeting (and learning from) you!
Today the actual conference started – about 200 people. Considering that most of us are total geeks I was surprised to see a good share of women in there. Of course I overslept a bit and missed the Welcome talk in the beginning, but except that – everything went great. The talks were all very interesting except the too techy ones. Believe it or not, Python was probably the most common word for the first three hours (at some point I was expecting KainX to storm in with a sword and a massive slaughter). And lots of slides with code. Too much code for a presentation in some cases.
The talks that were most interesting to me were… oh, well.
One of them was by a Argentinian graphic design professor. She talked about how she and her students used only open source software to create their stuff (which was pretty cool, by the way), into what problems they ran – purely technical or political, etc. On my question whether or not she’s afraid that after her students graduate they won’t be able to find jobs in companies/agencies because they don’t use the Adobe/Corel stuff, she replied that she is. But she’s encouraging them to use proprietary software from time to time so they’ll be able to work with both. We also agreed that the basic concepts of computer graphic manipulations are the same, the difference is in UI and other small things that are more or less easy to overcome.
We had both a workshop and a talk from an… actress. Helen Varley Jamieson, a very nice woman, she presented her thing – UpStage, which to my understanding is something like an online (streaming) theatre with creative people playing roles and… uh, lots of things. Just check it out :-) Of course part of her story was how free software helped her and her friends build the website (they’re using flash for some things tho).
There were two guys from the Fedora design project. I don’t remember their names, but they were funny – both very nervous and with very bad English. It was pretty cool to hear the story how the community made the pro designer hired by Red Hat leave and took over his job :-)
In the end three guys from some school in Rotterdam told us how they migrated the Arts course on open source. They even made the students (who were previously Win/Mac users) use Gentoo, simply because of the “culture shock”. The students actually did some pretty neat things… I was quite impressed.
Another thing that happened during one of the breaks – I accidentally (trying to find a spot with stronger wifi) met Jonathan Watt from Mozilla. Since he is working in the SVG team we had a talk on what things I miss and want to see implemented, etc. We had a really nice chat, in the end of which he actually said I helped him with my suggestions and examples of what I can’t do with SVG right now, so I was and still am very happy.
These are the highlights from today. I’m looking forward for tomorrow – some very interesting talks on Inkscape, Google’s new hosted fonts thing, Ghostrscipt, other typography/layout stuff. Stay tuned and if you want more updates, follow me on Twitter.
