Hopefully My Voice Will Hold Out

Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2011/04/29/lfnw.html

Those of you that follow me on
identi.ca already know that I caught
a rhinovirus, and
was very sick while at
the 2011
Linux Collaboration Summit (LCS). Unfortunately, the illness got worse
since I “worked through” it while at LCS, and I was too
sick to work the entire week afterward (the week of 2011-04-11).

I realized thereafter that, before the conference, I forgot to even
mention online that I was speaking and
chairing
the legal track at LCS. I can’t blame that on the illness, since I
should have noted it on my blog the week before.

So, just barely, I’m posting ahead of time about my appearances this
weekend at LinuxFest Northwest (LFNW). I have been asked
to give four (!) talks in two days; and unfortunately three are
scheduled almost right in a row in one day (I begged the organizers to
fix it so I was giving two each day, but they’d already locked in the
schedule, and even though I told them within hours of the schedule going
up, they weren’t able to change it.)

It’s a rather amusing story how I ended up giving four talks. Most of
you that go to many conferences (and particularly those that speak at
them) know that the hardest part of speaking is preparing a new talk. I
learned in graduate school that you must practice talks to keep
the quality high, and if a talk is new, I usually try to practice
twice. That’s a pretty large time investment, not to mention the
research that has to go into a talk.

So, what I typically do is have between three and five talks that are
“active” on my playlist. I’ll keep a talk in rotation for
about ten to eighteen months and then discontinue it (unless there’s new
at least 40% new material that I can cycle into, which I sort of
consider more-or-less a new talk).

Often, I’ll submit up to four active talks to a given conference. I do
this for a couple of reasons. The first and foremost reason is to give
choice to the program chairs. If I’m prepared to speak on an array of
topics, I’d rather offer up what I can to the chairs so that they can
pick the best fit for the track they wish to construct. The second
reason is, quite frankly, is for when I really want to go to a
conference. My employer only funds my travel if I am speaking at a
conference, so sometimes, if I really want to go, I have to increase my
odds as much as possible that a talk will be accepted. Multiple
submissions usually help in this regard (although I can imagine it may
hurt one’s chances in some rare cases).

Now, something happened with LFNW that’s never happened to me before:
the organizers accepted three of my four talk submissions, and
wait-listed one of them! I wrote to them immediately telling them I was
honored they wanted so many of my talks, and that I was of course happy
to give all of them if they really wanted me to. Then, I happened to be
working on my talks last weekend when the LFWN organizers were updating
the schedule, and suddenly, I reloaded the page and saw they’d added the
fourth talk as well!

So, in the next two days, I’m giving four talks at LFNW! Most of them
are talks I’ve given before (or at least, given substantially similar
talks), so I am not worried about preparation (although I may have to
skip any social events on Saturday night to practice the three-in-row
for Sunday). What I’m worried about is that my voice has just
recovered in the last few days from that long-lasting illness, and I am
a bit afraid it won’t hold out through all four. So, if you’re at LFNW
and notice I’m more quiet than usual in the hallway conversations (I’m
not known for my silence, after all ;), it’s because I’m saving my voice
for my talks!

Anyway, here’s the run down of my LFWN talks:

If you’re not able to attend LFNW, I’ll try to live-dent as much as I
can (when I’m not speaking, which will actually be almost half the
conference ;). Watch my identi.ca stream for the #lfnw tag.
In particular, I’m really looking forward to Tom
“spot” Callaway‘s
talk. I really want to
understand his reasoning for not signing the Chromium
CLA, since, as Fontana suggests, it might illuminate the reasoning
why developers might oppose CLAs for permissively licensed projects.

By way of previews of what conferences I’ll be at soon (I’ll try to
blog more fully about them a week before they start), I’ll be giving
keynotes at both Samba
XP and LinuxTag in
a few weeks (both about GPL compliance). I’ll also be speaking about
GPL compliance at OSCON in late July, and I might be on a panel
at the Desktop Summit. I hope to see many of you at one of these
events.

I should also apologize to the excellent folks who run RMLL (aka the
Libre Software Meeting) in France each year. When I came back so ill
from LCS and lost that whole week of work because of it, I took a hard
look at my 2011 travel schedule and I just had to cut something. I’m
sorry it had to be RMLL, but I hope to make it up to them in a future
year. (I actually had to do something similar to the LFNW guys in 2010,
which I’m about to make up for this weekend!)