So I just got back from Foresight 20/20 yesterday and it was a great success. Foresight 20/20 was the first ever Foresight user and developer conference and we had 30 attendees throughout the weekend. I arrived on Friday evening and met some other early arrivals at rPath’s HQ and then we went to go get some Thai food and then drinks. It was so great meeting all these people I work with and talk to only online. It was the first time I met many of them such as pscott, doniphon, dugan, jforbes, hpa and great meeting up with pcutler, kenvandine, ryanK, msw, jtate, elliot and stefw again.
On Saturday we officially started the conference and I met even more Foresighters (etank, jkeyes0, OgMaciel, devnet, gxti, and SM2k) . It started with a talk by Ken about the vision of Foresight. After that we had a discussion about what we each felt needed fixed with Foresight. This is a great way to start the weekend because then it helped to plan events geared toward fixing those issues. We also were given a overview of the roadmap for Foresight and its future. After that we had a hands-on packaging session where people could write packages and work with mentors to help improve their recipes. We then broke out into groups and went to go grab lunch. After lunch we broke out in 2 tracks I attended the track with the community building session followed by the Marketing session which I lead. After we finished with the conference for the day we went out to eat as a group and then went out for drinks.
Sunday was more of the unconference/unstructured style which I really like and think worked very well. We started off by having people suggestions possible session and hackfest these included packageKit hackfest, What we want from PackageKit, Foresight used in a business model, Foresight wiki cleanup hackfest, creating derived distros of Foresight, planning for the next Foresight 20/20 and many more. I was leading the wiki cleanup hackfest and then attended the packageKit idea session. After the conference ended on Sunday I played some smash brothers on the Wii with Elliot, jforbes and pscott. After we finished that and cleaning up after the conference we went to get supper and drinks at Raleigh Times, I highly recommend it. During dinner I had a great talk with dugan about what ChiPy has done to attract members to their meetings and how they structure their meetings. He was interested as he is trying to help improve the NYC Python Group.
Overall I feel that Foresight 20/20 was a great success and I will go no matter where its located. It was great putting faces to the nicks I talk to all the time in irc. Also the sharing of ideas in person was such a useful benefit to get everybody on the same page with a high level understanding. I look forward to the next Foresight 20/20 and would recommend coming to anybody no matter if you are a Foresight developer or just interested in learning more about Foresight.