Sandro Mathys

While I had no time to write a preview or daily reports for OpenExpo 2008 Zurich – which actually took place in Winterthur, Switzerland – I’ll give a review on that event.

It’s been my third OpenExpo but the first one on a business booth. At the two OpenExpo in 2007 in Bern and Zurich, I was staffing the Fedora booth, presenting that great linux distribution and the project behind as well as trying to get new contributors to help us make Fedora even better. This year was all different, I was presenting mainly Android and some my company’s work in general but also the company itself, Noser Engineering AG. I was not looking for contributors but for customers and new employees.

Did I say all was different? Well, that’s only true for the topics I spoke and discussed about. After all, it’s still the OpenExpo with its great competitive (in a positive way) and cooperative atmosphere – and it looks like it doesn’t matter whether you’re on the community or the business ’side’ (or off/on the carpet, as attendees of the OpenExpo might have noticed) to be part of the fun.

It’s once again been a great experience and I learned lots from discussion with visitors, staff of business as well as community booths and my colleagues at our own booth. I guess there weren’t as many visitors as the OpenExpo guys hoped for, but there’s not been a single boring minute. Always someone to have a talk with and I was thankful to be able to visit two presentations in the conference tracks, too. We were able to establish some very interesting and hopefully beneficiary business contacts, to get us into the minds of students (regarding their first employment after graduation) and to improve/extend some of our Android-centric ideas we had. Speaking about contacts, some time the other staff at our booth (booth pretty new in the opensource world) said to me “Do you know everyone here? There’s always someone stopping by to talk with you like you’re good old friends. How comes you know all this people? Is that related to the Fedora related work you do in the evenings after $dayjob?” Truth was, that 98% of the persons I spoke with (not counting new business contacts/business related) I knew from the previous two OpenExpos, only! The other 2% were people I know from LinuxTag or from my study program I graduated at in Winterthur. But myself, I only recognized that I really know lots of people there when they told me I do. And that’s exactly the amazing thing about the work in a community!

I’d like to thank the OpenExpo organizational staff for their great work, the Fedora Ambassadors who were staffing the booth this time (Fabian Affolter, Timea Rusz, Max Spevack and Joerg Simon) for understanding that I wasn’t able to help them out this time, Carlos Diener from Kubuntu/Openmoko and others for arranging a cheap accommodation for the community and everyone who I spoke with either business- or community-wise. Special thanks goes to my employer, Noser Engineering AG, and particularly to Daniel Bruengger and Hansjuerg Born who allowed me to staff the company’s booth, even though there’s been the most important company-internal event at the same time. Let me also thank Joerg Pleumann who was staffing the booth together with Daniel and me and helped me to most of my knowledge on Android I have.
(I feel a bit like if I’d won an Oscar or something after so many ‘ thank you’ saying, sorry for that).

I hope I can make it to OpenExpo 2009 in Bern which will take place on April 1/2. As well as all future OpenExpos too.