EuroFoo

« Lockpicking 101 at EuroFoo Camp. A few photos from the weekend. »

Jarkko and I spent the weekend at EuroFoo Camp which we were invited to and almost didn't go to since we thought it would be something like a blogerati love-in, but we wound up having a really great time. We usually go to a few perl conferences every year but this year we decided not to bother for a variety of reasons and it was great to see a few perl people we haven't seen in a while. It was also really nice to have a large number of people around who weren't involved with perl and who had interesting things to talk about all in a easily doable span of 2 days. OSCON is the neverending conference of 5+ days of non-stop talks, talking and drinking which just leaves you dead tired for about a week afterwards.

It was really weird when we arrived as there were a few perl people around to visit with but we watched all these people trickle in who didn't know each other and there was an awkwardness since everyone was wondering who everyone else was and what made them interesting, perhaps even what made themselves interesting. There was registration, dinner and drinking which seemed to help loosen things up a bit and get people away from clutching their iBooks for a few hours.

The coolest talk was lockpicking which was really fun to try even though I don't think I'll be changing careers to petty theft anytime soon. Barry 'The Key' Wels was a brilliant tutor in the art of opening locks. Tim Pritlove gave a really entertaining talk about project Blinkenlights that I had heard about but hadn't seen the video or the details on how they did it. It's a pity Helsinki doesn't really have any suitable buildings to put a blinkenlights installation in for the festival of light in early December.

A talk titled "Women in Open Source" was on the schedule with a male speaker which I wanted to go to because I was thinking it was going to be the usual guy talking to a crowd of guys wondering why there aren't any women around and I was looking to be amused. I was, in fact, rather pleasantly surprised to find no guys [2 did show up later] and the speaker was an anthropologist/ethnographer doing a study commissioned by the EU to study the dramatically low percentage [~2%] of women in open source. I have a lot of theories, but I'm very encouraged to see someone with the right background and training investigating this problem in a scholarly manner.

O'Reilly is going to do an OSCON in the EU next year so Gnat and Gina had a talk to get feedback and toss around ideas. I put a good word in for Tallinn since it's a nice, cheap venue that is close for all the Nordic countries for a change but the Germans do seem to have a very strong pull. :) They're planning on having a mailing list for people who are interested in the conference and who want to know as soon as they know where it's going to be. It will likely be a little different from the US OSCON, perhaps cheaper and smaller, but I'm very happy to see them finally coming to the EU. Of course, I now have this vision of Gnat as Chevy Chase in the O'Reilly European Vacation movie. :)

What else...geez, it was a whirlwind of 3 days with travelling on two of them which is always a very tiring way to see anything. We saw a lot of people we missed and met a few people who live a few blocks or km away but hadn't yet met as well. It was a really great time and it might spoil me for conferences in the future that are too long with too many people and with fewer interesting talks. Thanks, again, to the ORA folks for hosting such a nice gettogether. :)