The FISL 10 committee started announcing the list of talks that were accepted for this year's Forum. For those who never heard of it, FISL is the International Free Software Forum. Takes place in Porto Alegre, Brazil, every year usually at the end of April, moved up a couple of months this year. It's the biggest FOSS event in Latin America, third in the world last I heard.
I submitted four talks: two on DTrace (for the sysadmin and developer tools tracks), one on OpenSolaris called 'OpenSolaris in 45 Minutes', which is an updated version of the talk I have at the Ontario Linux Fest last year (can't believe it's been almost eight months already), and one on the scheduler, which is the one that got accepted. FISL is known for not accepting more than one talk per speaker.
Although I'm very excited about doing this talk, I was actually hoping/expecting that one of the DTrace talks would be accepted since it's a more recent/new/trendy subject. DTrace is not very well known in Brazil, we still have to overcome more basic adoption problems, maybe that explains it. But having used it on a daily basis for the last couple of years, it's hard to imagine people developing and running their systems without it. Maybe I'm lacking some perspective here, but I was hoping to be able to demonstrate DTrace to a large audience - which will happen anyway, at the floor, one small group of people at a time as it always does.
Another thing that was interesting is that all four talks got really good reviews and comments. Which again proves that people are still open to OpenSolaris as an alternative to other OSes. But the current community growth rate and activity in BR show that we are not taking advantage of that. I've been thinking about this for a good amount of time, and the only answer I can think of is knowledge. I think we as a community need to promote more technical events in Brazil, much like the Front Rage OSUG in the US, or the Tokyo OSUG, or other active OSUGs we always read about. Disseminating knowledge, I think, is the best way to grow our community.
To that end, the Porto Alegre OSUG is doing a DTrace Workshop on June 1st, for the 2009.06 launch. I think it would be much more effective if all the group members participating in FISL were fluent in DTrace, or ZFS, or Zones, .. We're also having a few other events throughout the month, as well as an OpenSolaris Tour just before FISL. Should be fun.
Anyway, if you're making your way down to FISL this year, please stop by and say hi. We'll be easy to spot.
