Report: openSUSE conference 2014, Dubrovnik.

One more fan-freakin-tastik openSUSE conference is over. Thank you Dubrovnik and local organizers for such fantabulous conference. Your city is beautiful. Too bad that the weather wasn't sunny all the time (don't forget that Dubrovnik is touristic city). The old city was dope. I mean it's very cool to stay inside the walls, go to school there. Of course restaurants, bars etc are expensive there, but still it's so cool!!!

Personally don't understand why everyone in the community linked Dubrovnik with Game of thrones series. It's a Hollywood product. Maybe I'm the only one that don't watch it. On the other hand, I saw the cruelty of civil war during 91-94 and the siege of Dubrovnik that lasted for 7 months. Of course a theme couldn't use that, since it's politics (although Game of Thrones has copyrights and it's better not to use it either).


Greeks, Brazilians, Germans and Czechs.
People there were kind and happy to help us. During the last 2 days of the conference, there was a religious youth festival and the city was too crowded. Good for us to mingle but the transportation to and from the venue was kind of difficult for everyone.

Now let's talk about the conference. I was volunteer. My duty was to keep social media updated. I didn't have time to attend to many presentations I had to watch if streaming was on, sound was OK and inform the video team if there was a problem.
This year, there wasn't an organized press room, so I could do this job from anywhere. So I took my netbook and sometimes I was in the presentations room, sometimes I was sitting at the GNOME Booth.

I also managed to bring swag and organize the GNOME booth. Thank you Kostas Livieratos, Anna Angelogianni, Apostolis Ntokos and Tobias Mueller that helped to have a great GNOME presence at openSUSE conference.

Regarding presentations, thank openSUSEtv, I saw them when I got back home. Here some highlights:

1. Since I'm not tech person, I like almost all Jos' presentations. My fav was the tips about the booths and presence. It was something that I studied and presented at openSUSE conference 2012. If we combine the presentation Social Skills for Geeks, we will have a better result to our community. Also another cool presentation was his tips to build a community in 10 steps. Since I'm passionate about ownCloud, it was good opportunity for me to watch what the new community manager has to say about it.

2. Of course Tobias' presentation about GNOME was something that I watched (since I didn't make it to see him live). I presented many things that he told us here in Greece. I used the new version 3.12 and I'm very excited about it. Richard Brown told us that new version is in Tumbleweed repos and on a stable repository so users can use it.

3. A must see presentation is Design and Branding - The Way Forward by Ken Wimer. Branding and new design is what makes the difference to every product (not only software). Typography, fonts, slides and how to present is what matters.

4. As part of the Travel Support committee, I presented a part about the program, but Ancor's presentation about how to use the TSP application to request for reimbursement, is the presentation we should use for future questions how to use the TSP tool.

Personal highlights is that I met with Tobias Mueller. We used to mail each other about GNOME. Now I met him AFK.


Also another highlight was that I met Michal Meeks. He had a keynote presentation about The Document Foundation and LibreOffice.



Anna, Apostolis, Wookey, Me, Francoise, Michael, Kostas
For more pictures you can check Google Plus Greece and Google Plus event page.

I hope I covered everything. Now the future. Next openSUSE conference will take place in The Hague. Thank to Hans de Raad. I'll see you next year!!!

I would like to thank openSUSE that sponsored part of my expenses for this conference.