An Open Letter to Luke Kanies about Conferences :)
In An Open Letter to Tim Bray about OSCON
documents his experience at OSCON.
I`'ve already commented earlier on different conferences and I feel his pain, some conferences don't fit your expectations because the target audience is different than you expected. Sometimes it's like talking about Single System Image clustering to a bunch of people that have just installed their first Linux box at home, other times it's like talking about the difficulty of configuring someones desktop preferences to a bunch of kernel developers, There's a good chance they don't care since they already know how to do that :)
However for me a talk was worth the effort if there was at least 1 person in the audience who learned something, If I can convince 1 (one) person in the audience to have a look at a project, to think about how he is working today and get feedback from him, it was worth the effort. And it's true that different areas of the opensource world should try to take a closer look at eachother, visit eachothers events and learn. You're never too old :)
So I`m sure that there was at least one guy in the audience who learned about Puppet and will start looking deeper into it.
Actually remembering LISA 05 , I submitted some Xen abstracts and didn't get accepted, only to have lots' of people complain why there was not one single Xen talk, so it seemed there were some issues on that conference program there too :) Actually I still didn't get any feedback on my abstracts on Xen deployments for this years edition.
So before the schedule is out lemme say this . imvho at this year's LISA there should at least be a talk on openQRM and some talks on deploying Virtual Machines. :)
Anyway .. the important part isn't even trying to interrest different kinds of people in your project , it's meeting them , it's hearing different opinions on how to do stuff and their reasons for doing so , It's learing from them , wether it's on kernel level, infrastructure level, or development level :)