Hey everyone,

Wanted to send out a report on how things went up at OSCON. Although I did not end up spending too much time at the booth, Lei and Joe (Smith) said that there was a good flow of traffic and lots of interest in SCALE from the people passing by. The exhibit floor was very similar in setupand layout as the SCALE one, more of a square layout, as part of the room was also used for the breakfast & lunch services that wereprovided.

The booth displays were somewhere between LinuxWorld & SCALE, Many of the same exhibitors that have been at SCALE before (Silicon Mechanics, Plainblack, FSF, Novell, etc.) had their usual displays while groups such as Sun & Intel had large displays. The first day of that the exhibit hall was open, starting at 10am there was a surge of people flooding through which as we've seen with SCALE, picked up when a talk let out and slowed down a bit once the next session started up. Second day was much slower but still had a decent amount of people movingaround.

OSCON was a good opportunity to see a lot of people that been at SCALE before, those that had not had definitely heard of it and were interested. I saw many SCALE 6x tshirts around the show and a few times walked by people overhearing them mentioning seeing something at SCALE.

At the end of the second day, Lei, myself and Ilan had a chance to sit down with the Linux Fest Northwest guys as well as Joe Brockheimer from OpenSUSE/Novell to discuss the idea of having a central website for cross promotion of the FOSS shows similar to SCALE and LFNW. Overall itwas a good discussion and we had a lot of good progress on that front.

I also had the opportunity to speak to a number of women at the show who had both attended or spoke at the WIOS event at SCALE 6x, including Allison Randal (OSCON co-program chair), Rikki Kite (Linux Magazine), Selena Deckleman (PostgreSQL). The recurring question that I was asked was whether we would be holding the event again. There was definitely a lot of interest in this and I expressed to them that the WIOS conference would most likely continue with some slight changes and hopefully more involvement from the community.

A funny note and a good testament to how good of a wordsmith that Orv is, I spoke to Joshua Drake from PostgreSQL who after telling me that he was glad to see me, immediately accused me of being a sellout. The April fools joke that Orv played about being bought by IDG was apparently so convincing that Joshua still believed that it was real! :)

Overall it was a good show and I think we generated a lot of interest for SCALE. As always it was great seeing all the familiar faces and hearing how excited they were about SCALE 7x.

Gareth