Safe as Milk

The end of an adventure

March 20, 2006 2:38 pm Dave Neary libre graphics meeting

So, the Libre Graphics Meeting is over.

No matter how much you do for a conference, there’s always more you could have done. I have had people sending me mail all weekend saying that they heard about the conference too late to come – all I can say is that this conference was such a success that there will definitely be a second act next year, somewhere around the world, so you’ll have another chance.

Over 3 days, we had an experiment in conference planning. To make things a little easier for us, we arranged for the GNOME CVS to SVN migration to be sabotaged, but in revenge the GNOME hackers persuaded Lyon’s tram drivers to go on strike on the day of the conference.

We had some really great presentations (all I can say about Xara is “Wow!”), and with people like Carl Worth and Bdale Garbee coming along to hang out for the weekend, there were lots of thought provoking conversations flying around.

For the first two days, the presentations created a central theme to the conference, and allowed people to get a decent overview of some of what’s happening in the various projects. And then on Sunday, the “unorganised” day, we had around 20 sessions on things like the Create project, running Photoshop plug-ins under Linux (without Wine, I think), documentation around the graphics applications, collaboration between Xara and Inkscape, FontForge and the Open Font Lincence, a bunch of Blender workshops but the very cool Rui Campos, and more (my head was hurting at one stage trying to figure out what was going on). It was just the right side of uncontrolled chaos, and it was enormously beneficial to all who attended.

And lots of people came. I was estimating between 200 and 300 people, and we were in that range over the three days, with over 150 people each day on Friday and Saturday.

But we didn’t want this to be a huge conference. The best thing, in my opinion, about the conference was the time we gave people to meet and talk, and the greatest compliment someone could make about the conference would be that they came away with more friends afterwards than before.

Here’s to next year’s organisers. The discussion about who will host the conference next year will be happening on the Create mailing list, which you can find on freedesktop.org – and anyone who has a blog, and works in creative free software applications, send rejon or bryce your RSS feed and get added to the blogroll at create.freedesktop.org.

Oh, and a small side note to say “Up Ireland!”