Ready for Paris? See you there in October!

It seems I’m continuing my pattern of posting less here, which I find to be a disappointing yet apparently an unescapable trend. If you haven’t seen my “dents” and “tweets” on the side of this page, feel free to follow me on identi.ca (charlesschulz) and on Twitter (ch_s). Note that I’m much more often on identi.ca than on Twitter. Today, I would like to send everyone reading this blog a very special invitation. The first LibreOffice Conference will take place in Paris, from the 12th to the 15th of October. These will be great days to meet face to face and to exchange though conferences and informal, quick talks about several topics related to LibreOffice development, distribution and design. Also, and this is important: our call for papers is open but it will close by the end of July, so feel free to submit your proposal now. I would like to unveil somewhat what we have in store for this event.

We will have 5 tracks : development, community, marketing; aside these, there will b two special tracks: one dubbed “technical bird of feather sessions” which is a “non-track” allowing anyone with a concrete issue or proposal to discuss it in front of the audience for 10 minutes (with five added minutes for questions) . You don’t need to submit everything for this one, but you’ll have to write your name on the spot and being queued for your talk. The second special track will be an ODF Master Class. It will gather both technical and policy-oriented talks and discussions about ODF in one big room. We will look for quality over quantity, but above all, we’re going to make this a fun, friendly and productive conference.

On the social and networking side, I can’t disclose too much what will happen; there will be parties, there will be cocktails, there will be announcements… We also hope you will enjoy the locations of the conference. As many of us come from the OpenOffice.org project we all have memories of large conference centers with an historical background. This year we decided to change things a little bit. Paris has enough monuments for everyone to enjoy;  but we wanted to “blend” our community with other projects and communities. That’s why we’ll have conferences in a wonderful places called La Cantine, a famous location for digital innovators and hackers, renowned for its BarCamps and its ability to gather many different kinds of people and entities to work towards one goal. We will also have conference at the IRILL (International Free Software Research Institute), an university building entirely dedicated to Free Software. Among other things, I hear you will be able to interact with several key Debian leaders and enjoy the design of this renovated building (with wireless connectivity).

Stay tuned for more information as we will be updating our Conference pages constantly. In any case, see you in Paris in October!