Eurobsdcon reprise

Finally someone else wrote about EuroBSDCon, Dru Lavigne.
The most interesting paragraph of her review critizes the BSD Developers as antisocial:

My attempts at conversation fizzled out shortly after “hello”. During the talks, noone would sit in my row and the seats immediately ahead of and behind me were embarrassingly empty. I was starting to wonder if I was suffering from a bad case of BO.

I have to admit, neither did I attend her talk nor did i talk to her :-(.
But I also noticed that this EuroBSDcon was a bit antisocial.
Some Examples:

  • At normal geek events there is a keysigning party (well party is an euphemism but it is at least a start for getting to know everyone). In Karlsruhe people just exchanged keys with people they already knew.
  • There was no list of all attendants, so you couldn’t find out whom you forgot to talk to.
  • grog complains in his diary, that we had to pay for the drinks at the social event. The social-event suited in a hangar-like hall was too cold to socialize.

Maybe this is specific to EuroBSDcon were 20 languages were spoken and the age of the attendants varies between 20 and 58. Additional people have a lot of respect for each other. But i hope we can do better next year and didn’t scare off Dru.

One thought on “Eurobsdcon reprise”

  1. That’s rather sad. If people can’t even socialize at events specifically catered to a common interest, there’s a real problem.
    I must admit however that I too have become somewhat more distant at these kind of events because I find other parts of my social life come more naturally and sometimes consider that there really is no free software community but rather a lot of free software developers that happen to make friends in that profession with some – and not with others.
    There are still many people I’d like to meet and I continue to love to meet actual friends I’ve made, but usually at events (LinuxTag, Kastle, FOSDEM) I find myself to be the only one or one of the few really interested in socializing outside of any scheduled arrangements. I perceived this as slightly more natural at LinuxWorld in San Francisco, but that might be due to the fact that the event was small and included several developers I am good friends with.

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