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I'm amazed by the international reach of Open Source events and the Open Source community.

The second (now annual!) Ontario Linux Fest was last weekend and it was a blast. I had a wonderful time mixing and mingling with sponsors, speakers and delegates from as near as Toronto and as far as Ottawa, Montreal, Rochester, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Fort Collins, San Francisco and Nizhny Novgorod Russia.

Wait. From Russia?

Yes.

Three delegates at OLF 2008 are regulars at a Linux User Group in Kirov. The Kirov LUG has about ten regular attendees and meets every week. These folks are in Canada for a couple of months of work and will return home shortly. I'm thrilled that they took the time to participate in Ontario Linux Fest. I had a great time speaking with them and learned about their LinuxFest at home. Apparently it is a camping destination that attracts folks a couple of weeks in advance.

The line up of speakers at OLF was great on paper and lived up to expectations. We were thrilled with the lineup last year and think that we improved a little bit this year. We added an extra track of presentations so were able to add diversity of topics as well. Having key project personnel to speak for as many topics as possible was our goal. Keynotes, Jon 'maddog' Hall and Jeremy Allison are about as authoritative as you can get on the Linux community and Samba. Invited Speakers Bradley M. Kuhn and Stephen Coast had packed and attentive rooms for their talks on the Software Freedom Law Center, the Software Freedom Conservancy and OpenStreetMap.

Topics for 2008 covered input to output to audio to outdoors with The Horizon of the Human Interface to mysqldump to Livin' La Vida Linux to OpenStreetMap. I heard positive comments about every presentation and presenter. The thing I heard most frequently from commenters was that they learned something that they hadn't expected to learn.

The volunteer team was as wonderful as ever this year. More volunteers got involved earlier and shared the organizational load. John and I can't thank them enough for that. The event-day team was fantastic.

John and Chris and Net Direct. Wow. OLF can't happen without you to shoulder the burden of signing contracts and clearing credit cards, hosting, bandwidth, coffee and doughnuts etc. The gravitas of Net Direct is largely responsible for the quality of speakers that we are able to attract. John's long weeks of pre-show preparation made the event happen.