Birds of a Feather

One of the great things about LISA are the Birds of a Feather (BoF) sessions in the evenings.  BoFs are either vendor- or attendee-led discussions on topics of professional or social interest.   Since, like most sysadmins, I enjoy talking about my work, I decided to schedule a BoF for users of Condor.  Condor is an open-source package for distributed, high-throughput computing developed at the University of Wisconsin and used in academia, the financial sector, and by major motion picture studios.

A handful of Condor admins showed up to discuss current and future work, ongoing issues, and the challenges in user engagement.  I took it as a sign of success that we talked right up until the beginning of the next BoF and that some people found me the next day to discuss things further.

An hour later, a Fedora BoF drew a crowd of about 50.  As a contributor to the Fedora Project, I was excited to meet some of my fellow contributors and members of the community.  There was little structure to this BoF, instead focusing on open discussion.  The attendees seemed to enjoy the discussion and several people grabbed the Fedora 14 live CDs to test the latest version of Fedora.

Participating as a host/facilitator of BoFs before I had ever sat in one as an attendee was in interesting experience, but it was also very rewarding.