My impressions of FalterCon

FalterCon 2007 took place on August 11, and it went quite well (IMHO, of course). Here I would like to share my personal impressions of the event, as well as make a few (somewhat) related observations.

When the news of the WalterCon cancellation broke out and I read about some people being left with non-refundable air tickets, my first reaction was "OK, let's do something with these guys." A few emails later with Mike Summers, Bryan Varner and Urias, we had decided on having a community gathering which, as many of you know, was to later be called FalterCon (yes, pun intended). In approximately two weeks, we found a venue (and a good one!), had this website running, prepared some nice promo material, and were able to gather nine people willing to attend (in the end, we were eight total; Isaac, we missed you!!). All in all, I think we did pretty well given the very little time we had.

FalterCon: what was it after all?

Let's start by clearly saying that FalterCon was not WalterCon, nor was it meant to be. We positioned FC as an impromptu community gathering, and that is what it really was: there was really no agenda beyond getting to know each other, doing some advocacy, and having some fun. Within that context, I think that we did pretty well. The Sunnyvale Baylands Park turned out to be a beautiful place, and the weather was simply gorgeous (not a cloud in the sky, plus the temperature was just about right). And above all, meeting other Haiku community members was a real treat; all the Haiku folks that showed up made FalterCon a very special event, and that of course also includes the people who joined us online through the webcast chat from all over the world. The Linux folks at Picn*x were also very friendly and welcoming of our gathering, which made it even nicer.

Who attended?

Let's see: we had Bryan Varner & his spouse Kylene, Michael Summers (who became the official FC reporter-cameraman), Urias McCullough (who put many hours in the preparation of the FalterCon CDs and the network gear that allowed us to connect to the Internet from Haiku), Andrew Bachmann & his wife (with whom Mike, Bryan, Kylene and myself had "dim sum" the next day for lunch), Jimmy Cederholm & family, Travis Geiselbrecht (a.k.a. Geist, of NewOS fame) and Scott McCreary (a.k.a. scottmc, the creator of BeDrivers). Eight people total, including myself. Bryan and Mike Summers came from out of state, and the rest of us were locals; well, sort of: Urias was about three hours away by car, and Jimmy is actually from Sweden, but was in the Bay Area (he travels back and forth frequently); on the webcast chat window I could see many familiar names too, some from as far as Japan (Sena-san, genki desu ka?!). Thanks guys for joining us remotely; your participation made FalterCon even more special.

Mike and myself arrived at the park quite early (around 9:30), with the intention of securing a place where we could have shadow and a power outlet close by. We found a good table close to one of the grills (which fortunately was not used, so we did not have to breath any smoke), and started setting up. Soon after arrived Urias, who brought all his gear in a big box, including a laptop that was going to be used as a wireless router so that we could connect with Haiku to the Internet. Urias setup worked pretty well, and soon after I was able to use Vision and BeShare.

The rest of the group arrived gradually, and before long we had the table full of laptops (including one belonging to the mistery lady with a red cap), and a cable mess (power, ethernet, etc.). When Travis arrived, we tried his Apple laptop to see if we could use it for the webcast, and oh surprise, it worked! (More observations on the webcast later.)

Edit: looks like I missed Eugene Tan, who apparently was there for a couple of hours in the afternoon (see first comment below). Sorry Eugene that I missed you!

What did we do?

So, what did we do at FalterCon? We did exactly what we said we would: get to know each other; there were the expected initial introductions between people that were meeting in person for the first time and a lot of casual socializing throughout the event, all between hamburgers, hot dogs and Haiku demos. :) This all happened in a very casual and enjoyable atmosphere. As people came over to our table, we would introduce them to Haiku, answer questions, and do demos. At one point in time, a couple of our guys (Urias and Mike?) went out to the other tables to hand out the Haiku flyers that we had made, and that brought a wave of curious people wanting to see what Haiku was all about. To get an idea of what the place looked like, check out the photo gallery.

The laptop that I used to run Haiku natively was an HP Pavilion zv5400us with an AMD64/3000+ CPU and 512MB of RAM. This machine is very Haiku friendly: (accelerated) video, network and sound all work well out of the box. It had been a while since I had run Haiku natively (I play every once and then on VMWare), and I have to say that it felt good. To demo Haiku, I had copied about 100 people files that I would use to run queries, and a few video files that I carefully chose to be able run multiple instances of the Media Player as a way to show how smooth Haiku is even under heave load. During the demos I ran 6-7 instances of the Media Player playing these videos simultaneously (including one of Bruno a.k.a. BGA giving an OpenBFS presentation at the Kansai Open Source conference) plus a few MP3 and OGG music files, all at the same time, and Haiku kept running really smooth (see video here). As a matter of fact, Haiku on my laptop did not crash at all during the day. Ironically, at the beginning of one of my demos I (manually) restarted Haiku to show how fast it shuts down and boots, and Urias asked me if I had crashed it. So Haiku has definitely become way more stable and solid than it was a few months ago. :)

What did the Linux folks think about Haiku?

I am sure some of you would like to know what the Linux folks thought about Haiku. My general impression is that they think it is a neat idea. Not only did I not get the dreaded "why not Linux?" question (I don't know if anybody else did), but in general the people that I showed Haiku to showed a positive reaction. This is actually a repeat of my experience at the SCaLE conference last February, where I was taken a bit by surprise how the supposedly "Linux only audience" there was quite receptive to the idea of a desktop focused OS like Haiku. Now, will any of these people that saw and learned about Haiku at FC begin contributing code right away, or at any point in future time for that matter? I don't know. Probably not; maybe one or two eventually do (there were a couple of very young fellows who looked quite interested). But of one thing I am sure: more developers know Haiku today than they did before FC, and this people can actually spread the word. And that is the whole point. Marketing is a long process that requires persistence, and raising awareness is the first step in the road long to adoption. Being at the Linux Picnic fulfilled that first step nicely.

What's there to learn from FC?

Would have I done anything differently? Nothing/nobody is perfect, and there is always something to learn. As a start, I would say that next time I should not forget the donation jar. :P Yeah, I screwed up, and forgot to bring one. I felt both stupid and bad after announcing it with such fanfare on haikuware.com, but, oh well, I guess nobody is perfect. We already notified Karl vom Dorff about the "mishap", and are glad that he accepted our apologies graciously. In a sign of repentance, I have pleged to make a donation to one of the Haiku bounties that Karl is running. I heard somebody else will also make a symbolic donation, and I encourage everybody else who wants to see Haiku succeed that they open up their wallets and make a contribution to their preferred Haiku bounty. My donation will go the Webkit port, my favorite bounty. ;) Other than that, I would have made a conscious effort to make the webcast a bit more interactive, like having attendants sit one by one in front of the camera to chat live with the viewers. Some form of support from the Haiku project itself to this community effort would have been nice too. (Edit: Very poor choice of words in my last sentence. Haiku did actually support FalterCon by posting a news about it on the Haiku website where they acknowledged our effort (thanx Axel!), expeditiously reviewing the Haiku flyer that we put together (thanx mlotz!) and even providing some artwork for it (thanx Stippi!). There is one side of me though that would have liked to see some sort of "tangible support," as in the form of Haiku T-shirts for all of us to wear at the event, which I was hoping that we would get. But maybe that was simply a misplaced expectation on my side. Anyway, to set the record straight, Haiku did support FalterCon, and for that I am grateful.)

Webcasting: a great tool that deserves more use

I would like to make a few observations about the USTREAM-based webcast that we did from FC. I have to say that USTREAM is really neat, and very easy to both setup and use. I can see how it could be a very powerful tool for many purposes, from PR to community building and online dev workshops. For example, it could be used to give the community an opportunity to chat/interview the Haiku developers in real time; instead of communicating via IRC, the viewers would post their questions via the chat window, and see the interviewee respond in real time over the video/audio live feed. I suppose it would also be possible to have live developer training sessions. There are a couple of neat things about USTREAM: one is the ability to embedd both the video stream and the chat window in any website. This greatly expands your ability to raise awareness of the webcast by reaching out to many more people. The other neat feature (we did not do this at FC because we thought it was overkill) is that you can also record the webcast, so that you can make the video available for download for those who miss the broadcast or who want to see it again after the fact; if I am not mistaken, the recordings can also be embedded in HTML, so the "spread the word effect" becomes even greater. I am sure there are many other ways this tool could be used and, as I frequently say, it's a matter of being creative. :)

The future

I was asked if there was going to be another FalterCon in the future. My answer is this: I personally enjoyed very much being at the Linux Picnic, so I think I would enjoy being there again next year. However, I do hope (I really do) that we do not have to call it FalterCon again. But you never know, do you? :P

A call to the community

To end, I would like to take the opportunity to encourage other Haiku fans out there to find conferences and other similar open source events close to where they live, and consider organizing a Haiku presence there. Many open source conferences offer booth space for free to projects like Haiku, and not much monetary investment is needed. You really don't need to be a kernel developer to spread the word; a laptop with Haiku running and maybe some files to show stuff like queries, and video/sound capabilities is all you need if you want to show Haiku off. Handing out Haiku flyers is also a good guerrilla marketing method; there is a Haiku flyer already available, that you can use as is or modify and/or translate as needed. Not only is it a lot of fun, but it also gives non-developers an opportunity to contribute to the advancement of Haiku. One piece of advise though: don't try to do this sort of thing alone. Not only is it more fun to have company, but it is also much easier when you share the burden before and during the event among multiple people. What's more, openly sharing the process that leads to the event from an early stage makes it much more likely that others will feel inspired to help out or even attend the event. Perhaps more importantly, I have come to learn that these activities significantly strengthen the bonds that unite community members that both organize and attend the event, something that I believe is of great importance in community building, particular for a project as small as Haiku.

There is a (very) long video of FC that was recorded (mostly) by our official reporter-cameraman Mike Summers. I believed this video will be edited and released at some point in time. We will announce it here and on the Haiku mailing list when it becomes available. We may need some bandwidth for it, so if you have some to spare, please come forward by leaving a comment here or sending an email to the Haiku mailing list.