Speaking at ApacheCon
September 10th, 2007 by HenI’ve taken the plunge this year and I’m going to be speaking at ApacheCon 2007 in Atlanta. It’s at 3pm on the 15th of November and is called “How to make Friends and Influence Projects“. At the time the title seemed witty, though I’ve already renamed it to “How to Make Patches and Influence Projects” in my head (and probably on the slides too).
The synposis is:
Committers get all the attention on a project, but there is a huge amount that non-committers can do even without that elusive commit karma. In this session we cover various strategies that can be applied to make a difference to an open source project, either to bring a dormant project back to life or to prove yourself the ideal committer.
It’s a mix of tactics and approaches on how to contribute effectively to open source projects, whether all you have time for is to report a bug, or whether you want to see a release happen. There’s nothing very Apache related about it, hopefully it’ll be of interest to those who don’t want to know about Apache James, WS vs REST and HTTP Server.
Mostly I’m worried about using a mic and standing on stage. I’ve never used a mic before, and I’ve never looked down on people while talking, it’s always been at the same height.
The last time I did any speaking it was a disaster (it was an exercise in a PR class). Prior to that it had gone well in JUGs. I think because I have to be excited about the topic, it’s not something that can be turned on and off for me. This is a subject I believe strongly in, so I’m looking forward to it. There’s no reason why a contributor can’t put forward a quality patch to a project they barely know.
So register with the early bird program in the next week and a bit and save some cash 