Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls, Geeks and Geekettes, lend us your ears!
As a geek and founder/trustee of the Utah Open Source Foundation, I felt it necessary to help get the word out about our upcoming conference and a few cool things happening.
The Call for Papers for UTOSC 2008
The Call for Papers (http://2008.utosc.com) has been open for about 2 months now. June 1, 2008 is the last day to can submit an abstract. Presentations should be approximately 1hr, including Q&A time. A good post (http://www.utos.org/2008/03/02/utosc-2008-call-for-papers-get-moving/) has been placed on the Utah Open Source website to help with criteria and suggestions.
The Utah Open Source Awards 2008
Will again be highlighting excellence in open source. We're currently accepting nominations at awards@utos.org. Three categories existed last year, Community, Business and Technology. In addition, this year we're adding a new award for excellence in open source for Education.
Family Day
- Because of Utah's family oriented culture, we've decided to focus on how to help families use open source. On Saturday, August 30, 2008, we're inviting registered attendees to bring their immediate family/significant other to UTOSC 2008. Different family oriented activities will be available including, educational games for kids, digital scrapbooking courses, outdoor games and more.
Booths
- UTOSC 2008 will have booths this year. In fact, we'll have approximately 20 booths. Attendees will want to visit these booths because we'll be inviting some of the non-profits we all adore to man a booth and share the open source word. Think, OpenSUSE, Fedora, Ubuntu, GNOME, KDE, etc., and local LUGs too. This is a great way to learn about your favorite .org! Booths will first be available to our Diamond, Sapphire and Emerald sponsors. We'll reserve approximately 5-7 smaller booths for the non-profits (.orgs) Other sponsorships are also available.
More details can be found on our sponsorship documents (http://www.utosc.com/08/pdfs/utosc2008sponsorships.pdf) and (http://www.utosc.com/08/pdfs/utosc2008prospectus.pdf)
Conference Registration
Because we're attempting to roll our own open source conference management system (http://code.google.com/p/utos-conman), we are madly working on finalizing the registration system. We plan to have conference registration open by June 1. Announcements will be made in the usual places so keep an eye out!
Volunteers Needed
- We're in need of many volunteers this year as we expect it to grow almost 100% from last year. We have several positions defined and will be doing a call for volunteers soon. Here's a short
list from the wiki page (http://wiki.utos.org/UTOSC2008/VolunteerPositions).
- Room Manager - In charge of a particular room for a 4 hour or 8 hour shift.
- Ambassador - Provide guests with directions to particular rooms and events.
- Registrar - Help get badges, check-in attendees and solve registration related issues.
- Blogger - Share the updates of what's going on in each of the rooms.
- Other positions might also be available as we get closer to UTOSC 2008