Libre Planet 2010

I took a redeye out of SFO and landed in BOS at 7:30am EST. I got into a cab with a driver who kept bugging me about paying cash even though I insisted I wanted to pay with my credit card. I arrived at 1 Oxford St., Cambridge, MA. at 8:15am for Libre Planet 2010. Needless to say, I was a bit tired already.

Leslie arrived later in the morning and we spent some time catching up. I reviewed the agenda for the weekend, saw the introduction, and stuck around for the Intro to the Command Line class. Having just announced accepted orgs for Google Summer of Code™ 2010, I was still responding to emails and trying to fix problems where we found them.

I met Selena very early in the day. We spent some time standing outside Hall D and charging our laptops, making presentations, and gabbing. Unfortunately my brain was slowly shutting down from lack of sleep and a bit of stress from the previous days. I decided to stay for a few more hours and then left after lunch. I checked into my hotel and got some sleep. I left the hotel feeling significantly more human than when I went into it.

Dinner with the Women of Free Software was great. I met some amazing women who are really doing some great things for free software and the community as a whole right now. I'm really looking forward to seeing them again and working with them on all manner of topics. I went to bed on Friday night thoroughly excited about the opportunities now presenting themselves for me.

Saturday was full of some great topics. Discussions throughout the weekend ranged from "should you pro-actively justify your use of proprietary software or hardware if you have an arm of your business that advertises its use of free software" to "what is the best way to get yourself recognized for your contributions to the community without the use of a patent?"

I think the best topics came on Sunday, though. Deb had arranged an entire track of topics on Sunday related to Women in Free Software and I found it incredibly useful. Selena did a talk on "50 Ways to Love Your Project" and I am now tempted to ask her if I can crib some of the presentation because it was so wonderful. I think encouraging people to give back to FOSS in more ways than just coding is really important if we want to continue to build the community.

Most important of all, though, I spent some time really thinking about how I feel about all these issues of privacy, freedom, and open now that I am apart of the community. It was a great learning experience for me and I hope to get to go back next year.