CommunityOne and The First Day at the Moscone Center

Gary, Me, Ashwin, Avinash, Tom, Hyejin, Felipe and Kevin rushed down to the Moscone center on the first day of the conference, it was most certainly an enjoyable hustle. We entered Moscone, registered for JavaOne and CommunityOne 2009, got our conference attendee badges, conference agenda and other material.. and then we went off to get more material downstairs.

Arrival, Registration and material collection at the Moscone center

The CommunityOne General Session

CommunityOne started with a bang. We all took up front seats few minutes before the session started. Gary introduced us to Lin Lee, our super-super-boss, VP of Global Communities in Sun. Checkout Gary’s JavaOne minute taken just when the halls were filling up. The session's highlights were Sun's new cloud computing offerings. David Douglas, Senior Vice President at Sun for Cloud Computing took the stage to talk about citizen engineering, eco computing and various other stuff and then came then came to the exciting part: he called on stage, 4 of the campus ambassadors who were sponsored to attend JavaOne this year: Avinash Joshi from India, Felipe Cerda and Tom Petreca from Brazil, Hyejin Park from South Korea and Kevin Li from China. David asked them to talk about their experiences as campus ambassadors, in fostering open source clubs on their campus and leading their OSUM communities.

CommunityOne Keynote	David Douglas, Sun VP, Cloud Computing	John Fowler and Panel
Campus Ambassadors on Stage with David	Gary Serda, Manager of CA Program

We all listened to them proudly. Then John Fowler came to set the stage on fire with the launch of OpenSolaris 2009.06 and a discussion of all its great new features! While the presenters kept throwing all the cool stuff at us I tried to keep up with them and tweet updates along the way. Unfortunately the WiFi really sucked at the Moscone Center and I had to do that on my international roaming airtime, but I guess it was worth it. Gary did a JavaOne minute with Avinash to get to know about how he felt being up there on the stage at the CommunityOne keynote! While there were many exciting things announced and demoed during the keynote (you can watch the replay here!), my personal favorites are Crossbow's new drag-drop GUI, multicore optimized networking stack and JavaFX finally working on OpenSolaris (and so well too!). As expected there was a huge crowd at the keynote and lot of people were standing just outside the hall to discuss how things went in the keynote. Thats when we ran into Valeriya Alaverdova, Program Coordinator in the Sun Marketing Team who had travelled to JavaONE all the way from Russia. We did a JavaOne minute with her about how things are going for her and what she's there for. Then we caught hold of the OpenSolaris Community rockstar - Jim Grisanzio in the flesh! I have been following Jim's blog since a long time and keep reading his mails on opensolaris-announce, advocacy-discuss, etc. He is undoubtedly the best community manager the opensolaris community could ever have. We did another quick JavaOne minute with him on his thoughts about CommunityOne and the amazing keynote we just attended. We also ran into Sriram Narayanan! He's a very active member of the Bangalore OpenSolaris Usergroup. I was quite happy to meet him there.

Colin Cupp & Kirby Kerr	James Gosling’s Memory Lane	Gary wearing the OSUM booth T-shirt

You can see all the keynote replays as well as read their summaries here.

At the end of the exciting as well as tiring day, we had the Pavilion reception, with good food. The catering was good. There was a long line for the beer so I skipped that. At around 6.25 PM we were surprised by a group of dancers and musicians taking a backdoor entry and catching everyone’s attention by parading through the Pavilion..!

This is part of a series of blog posts on my JavaOne 2009 experience..