Comments on: Poll: best speaker ever

By: Beth Walsh

Beth Walsh — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 13:54:17 +0000

All you need is ignorance and confidence and the success is sure.

By: just me

just me — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 22:22:40 +0000

Kathy Sierra was a great speaker. Give her a hug from us since she resigned from public live!

By: Sven Arvidsson

Sven Arvidsson — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 21:44:35 +0000

Travis, Cory Doctorow apparently uses gedit to do all his writing now, so I guess it’s safe to assume he uses the rest of GNOME too:

http://www.boingboing.net/2007/11/16/droid-sans-mono-a-sw.html

By: Travis Reitter

Travis Reitter — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 17:18:24 +0000

I second Cory Doctorow. He’s a great speaker, always has lots of interesting ideas, and is a professional writer who is a great advocate of Creative Commons. I think this video is a good sample of the sorts of talks he gives:

http://www.redhat.com/magazine/020jun06/features/video_doctorow/

Also, he’s a longtime Mac user who made some waves when he switched to Ubuntu a while back. I don’t think he’s followed up about it since then (though I think I saw him say that he’s been using it the whole time, just hasn’t gotten around to mentioning it). So he quite possibly has been using Gnome all that time.

By: otte

otte — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 08:09:30 +0000

Yeah, Katy Sierra’s talk was awesome.
Mark Shuttleworth’s talks are cool, too, but for the content. So their quality depends a lot on whether he has something to say.
I only watched it on Google Video, but I enjoyed Linus’ git talk a lot. Plus, I think it would be great to have him rant one hour about GNOME in a GUADEC keynote.
And I’ve heard Randall Munroe is a great speaker.

But talks are generally more interesting when the topic is relevant. So I guess it’s better to invite speakers that have something to talk about than people that are good at talking about nothing.

By: liberforce

liberforce — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 23:55:40 +0000

Clearly, it was Katty Sierra at GUADEC 2006 about creating passionate users.
Best. Presentation. Ever.

By: Federico Mena Quintero

Federico Mena Quintero — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 18:54:14 +0000

Maddog.

(Hmm, did he already keynote for us once?)

By: Stormy

Stormy — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 17:47:52 +0000

One that was surprisingly good and funny was Rob Curley at OSBC. I say surprisingly because I didn’t know who he was and I wasn’t expecting a newspaper guy to have much to do with open source but he had some amazing stories of enabling really useful cool things with open source. (I guess I should have expected good story telling from a newspaper guy now that I think about it!) I still remember most of his talk which is pretty impressive.

By: Paul Cooper

Paul Cooper — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 17:23:39 +0000

Not sure why I didn’t add his name to the list of potential keynoters but without doubt the most consistently amazing speaker I’ve seen is r0ml, aka Robert Lefkowitz. You know how Peter Parker got his spidey power by being bitten by a radioactive spider – well r0ml was bitten by a radioactive library. Just check out his stuff on IT Conversations and you’ll see what I mean – although you really need the slides sometimes.

By: No'

No' — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 16:27:17 +0000

Definitely Damian Conway.
I saw his talk at EUROOSCON 2005 entitled “Fun with dead languages” and it was absolutely brilliant, fun and interesting, though.
He even made a rock-star-like funny parody of Web 2.0 cxap entitled: “openTalk 2.0 – Maximizing Non-stakeholder Buy-in by Leveraging Depatented Generic Information protocols”. I cried out of laughter.

On the same day, I saw Cory Doctorow’s talk. It was utterly brilliant, too. This guy has got a dozen of ideas per second.