FOSDEM 2009 is over and it was a great success!
PostgreSQL shared a developer room together with the *BSD groups and we also had a booth where many visitors passed by and stopped for asking questions or buing some of our merchandising stuff.
Most of us started with our own social event in the Restobières. That’s a nice place but it’s complicated to lift a buggy into the second floor.
On saturday we started at 11 am, unpacking all boxes and preparing the booth:
Some well knows faces were helping:
But we were also able to attract new people to join us this year:
Chepra: for PGDay 2009 and for FOSDEM 2010 you are bound in honour to give a talk ;-)
After preparing the booth we had to hurry up for the devroom - that’s when the trouble started. The projector did not work and the FOSDEM staff brought a new, portable one. This one had not enough light for the big room, so most of the time we had the window blinds down. I hope, the video camera was nonetheless able to record good videos.
In the two days we had many interesting talks and beside the fact that the devroom was several walking minutes away from the main buildings many of the talks was very well visited. I just want to mention Simons talk about “replication, replication, replication” which Selena already blogged about.
Saturday in the evening we went to a lebanese restaurant (Mont Liban restaurant) just around the corner from our hotel. The dinner was superb and Simon & Peter enjoyed the belly dancer ;-)
Thanks to Patryk for providing the evidence.
The music for the dancer was very (very!) loud. The waiter asked me beforehand, if they can start loud music (our son was sleeping in his buggy) but as soon as the music started I realized what he meant with “loud”. But Pascal took the chance and was dancing in my arms too - pity I don’t have pictures of this :-(
After dinner most of us went back to the hotel but some could’nt resist (or did not learn from last years experience ;-) ) and went for “just one beer” into a bar. I was told, the “one beer” lasted until 2:30 am and seduced to get a nap in the devroom next morning.
On Sunday just before Heikki’s talk we auctioned off the big blue elephant:
This girl was the lucky winner and proposed to give Slonik a new home:
Conclusion: this years FOSDEM was very successfull. Just some notes for next year: we need more elephants and more mugs. Live CDs would be a good option too and we need to rework all the flyers we have. More notes are in the wiki.