Arrival at CommCon 2019

Last night I arrived at CommCon 2019 in Latimer, Buckinghamshire, a stone's throw from where I used to live in St Albans, UK. For many of you it is just a mouseclick away thanks to online streaming.

It is a residential conference with many of the leaders in the free and open source real-time communications and telephony ecosystem, together with many users and other people interested in promoting free, private and secure communications.

On Wednesday I'll be giving a talk about packaging and how it relates to RTC projects, given my experience in this domain as a Fedora, Ubuntu and Debian Developer.

David Duffet, author of Let the Geek Speak, gave the opening keynote, discussing the benefits and disadvantages of free, open source software in telecommunications. This slide caught my attention:

where he talks about the burden of

ruthless ungrateful expectations for continued service and evolution

on developers and volunteers. This reminded me of some of the behaviour recently documented on my blog.

CommCon organizers and sponsors, however, have found far more effective ways to motivate people: welcome gifts:

There is some great wildlife too: