I know, I know this is a lot later than I promised.

That is what happens when you go to a conference then come back to the real world…It seems to take a week of preparation before you leave and a week of preparation after you get back from any break to really get back in the swing of everything. Anyway, I digress…

So, its Day 2 of the conference. After an overwhelmingly awesome first day, everything sort of settled into a rhythm. We got the technical bugs worked out and started adding in lightning talks! (I think next conference I will have to sign up for one.)

The talks were amazing. We heard from KDE about their application deployment strategy and their application ecosystem. However, the not-as-technical talks is what really grabbed my attention. I was really surprised to be honest, I expected I would dive deep into technology on this trip… Not so much! Instead, I found myself drawn towards a few talks in particular:

The first was a pair of talks from Ryan Gorley, owner of FreeHive an open source graphics design agency. He talked about the need for innovation beyond Adobe Cloud and the needs of creatives from Desktop Linux and the accompanying application ecosystem. There were a pair of talks from Elementary as well discussing their attempts to monetize open source to allow developers to actually make money off their work!

However, I think the talk that I engaged with more than any of Day 2 was a talk about making open source attractive to students. Heidi Ellis and Gregory Hislop are working to integrate open source into the college curriculum at large but more than that help students fall in love with the FOSS community. Having dealt with the dumpster fire that is /r/Linux (Reddit) and seeing some of the venom of a small minority of the FOSS community, it played back into my thinking about how to introduce students, creatives, and non-technical folks into what the true intent of the open source community really is…

The night continued with Game Night, trivia led by System76’s own Emma Marshal and dinner with different people from the conference. Talks went late into the night…but it was all worth it!