Last week-end I was in Greece, in Thessaloniki, enjoying the openSUSE Conference 2013. If I had to summarize the event in one word, that would be: wow! It was the first time we had this event in another city than Nuremberg and Prague (two places where SUSE has offices), and it was the first time the organization was fully lead by the community. I was quite confident that things couldn't go wrong since, after all, what matters is that we're all in the same place. But I was amazed that the whole event went so smoothly! This was really a great job from a whole team of volunteers:

Just to give an example of the hard work that was accomplished: most (all?) talks were successfully streamed, and the recordings are already online! Stella and Kostas definitely deserve credits for the overall success, as they kept leading the organization in the right direction since last year, and the event wouldn't have been possible without their dedication. Our sponsors also helped make all this happen, so many thanks to SUSE, ARM, DevHdR and Oracle!

Having people from all over the world was once again an opportunity to meet up with old and new friends, who were coming from Brazil (Izabel, Carlos), the US, all over Europe obviously, but also India (Manu, Saurabh) and China as well as Taiwan (Sunny, Max, David, etc.)... The conference is the global event of the openSUSE community, without any doubt. With 250 attendees, there were a lot of hallway chats and informal meetings; I'm sure the GNOME couch tradition that we initiated with Dominique and Richard will stay over the years ;-)

Unsurprisingly, the openSUSE Board took opportunity of having so many community members to discuss several topics with as many people as possible. The board also organized for the first time a session about team reports. Even though several teams didn't participate to that session (generally because no team members was there), we had more than ten teams joining the party on stage, and this was probably one of the best way to see how broad our community really is and to learn the latest developments in various areas of the project. We also had our usual town hall meeting which went rather nicely, with useful feedback to the board.

The bad thing for me is that I had to stay only for a few days due to work, but there's already a next opportunity to meet with the community: this will be the openSUSE Summit in Orlando next November. And if you cannot make it, then I can only recommending making sure that you will join us next year, for the openSUSE Conference in Dubrovnik!