FrOSCon in Germany was a real success - Mailing list pgsql-advocacy

Hello,

FrOSCon (Free and Open Source Conference) in St. Augustin (near Bonn,
Germany) is a
little bit like FOSDEM in Brussels.

It always is in summer during university vacation in the
Bonn-Rhine-Sieg University of Applied Sciences.

FrOSCon was last weekend (20 / 21 August).

I counted 14 rooms with talks.
5 rooms in main track + 1 for workshops and 1 for labs -
7 rooms for projects

Of course there also was an exhibition - the ground floor mall and the
canteen were used for booths.

The weather was enormous hot and sticky - we expected people will prefer
to go swimming instead of visiting FrOSCon. Anyway - round about 1500
visitors
made it. I have to say here - the orga always just count 1 when a person
is there
on both days and they exclude speakers, exhibitors, and helpers.

Air-conditioning in Germany - yes there is a little bit - but of course
the rooms
got ugly in the afternoons.

Of course there also was a PostgreSQL booth.
The booth hall always was full of people.

FrOSCon wants to be international. They were proud that they managed
to get 50% english talks in main track. It was the wish that also the
project
try to get talks in english.

The audience on FrOSCon is very a strange mix:
You have lots of people with very deep technical knowledge. Deep
technical talks
are always welcome. I would say this is the biggest group.
There is a group who just visit FrOSCon who want to get more knowledge about
Open Source and of course FrOSCon is for getting "fresh meat" - young
people and
students who want to contribute one of the projects in future.
Additionally - there is a business group.
People (usually they also have a deep technical knowledge) from companies,
research and government who just want to inform about what's new in open
source. What is possible without paying money. People who like to get
informations
from devs and not from marketing.

FrOSCon was very database oriented this year.
PostgreSQL has had an own dev room on Saturday where we managed
to get 7 talks (2 of them in English).

Additionally, an independent guy organised an open source database camp.
It was
both days. Here you could find independend talks for beginners (Design
and SQL),
PostgreSQL talks, MariaDB / MySQL talks, MongoDB talks, talks about
replicating to
different system, migrating from/to different systems.

There wasn't a talk from a Oracle/MySQL representative at all.
All MySQL talks were made from people close to Monty and MariaDB.

As final highlight in the open source database camp they  made an open panel
discussion with Alvin Richards (MongoDB), Monty Widenius (MariaDB) and
.... Simon Riggs.

The discussion was very brave. Nobody really tried Monty or Simon or Alvin.
I filmed the discussion - but I not yet viewed the material.
I fear especially the audio will suck.

The audience was very brave at all this year. There wasn't a real battle
- even not on
really provoking talks.

Anyway - FrOSCon again was a great event.

My personal opinion is - 14 rooms in parallel already is the limit. It
felt too much.
10 would have been enough.
Too much database and programming language stuff - in any case way too much
none technical stuff and marketing talks - way too less talks about
fundamental
stuff like linux, bsd, kernel, filesystems and so on (when I saw it
right there wasn't
a single talk about it).

Susanne

--
Susanne Ebrecht - 2ndQuadrant
PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Training and Services
www.2ndQuadrant.com