On bootstrapping a community-run FOSS event

“On Saturday, April 10th, I was in Austin Texas for the
inaugural Texas Linux Fest (TXLF), a community-run FLOSS
conference. The idea to stage the show arose last August during
OSCON, picked up steam in the fall, and in the end a little under
400 people turned out — including speakers and volunteers
— which most considered a successful number for a first year
event. [TXLF attendees]

“The fact that it worked demonstrates that the developer and
end-user open source community is eager to get together. But that
fact guarantees no automatic success; along the way the TXLF
planning team met challenges that anyone investigating launching
their own regional show could learn from — as well as
opportunities where the open source community could build tools
useful for a wide range of all-volunteer projects.

“Brief background

“The genesis for TXLF was a series of independent conversations
along the lines “there should be a regional community Linux show in
Austin,” mostly by Matt Ray of Zenoss and myself, with other
people. Eventually both Ray and I had that conversation with Ilan
Rabinovitch of SCALE, who told us to start talking to each other.
Gathering all of the interested parties in one place was the first
challenge. There is little you can do other than put the word out
in every conceivable medium and see what happens — the group
contacted individual free software hackers, business contacts, and
every regional LUG and developers’ group with an active presence on
the Internet.”

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