So I am on my flight back from a great trip. It started with the Plone Conference in Seattle which we broadcasted into Second Life (more on that in a follow-up post) and which had 350 attendees, 70% being for the first time at such a conference. We also had training in front of it which was attended by 130 people (if you don’t know what Plone is, it’s an Open Source Content Management System, more info about it can be found at http://plone.org).
After the conference we had a 2-day programming sprint where we had about 60 people attending and about 50% or more being the first time at a sprint. And there has been a serious amount of work been done like better multimedia support, Membership management improvements, easier customizations, GIS integration and much more. I will publish some videos on my videoblog later. All in all it was a blast and we have lots of fun and I got to meet a lot of great people there (mostly those I don’t see at european conferences).
Then I went on to San Francisco to meet more people 
Apparently San Francisco has some Second Life folks around (but also Plone folks, eventually making it for me the perfect city to live in 
). So I got to meet Dancoyote Antonelli, an art student at the San Francisco Art Institute and also an artist in Second Life (I did some video work for him). He showed me around the Art Institute and also around the Mission district. I walked half the city, from Mission to Height to Downtown and later went to some Halloween parties. One was the children side of it, the other was at Castro, the gay area of San Francisco where I again met up with some Plone folks and where we passed some police action later. It turned out to be some shooting we gladly missed by 10 minutes. So for me coming from peaceful europe that’s definitely something we don’t really have (but I guess we are getting there at some point unfortunately).
I also got to meet the Millions of Us people and later on I got a tour of Linden Lab (but apparently I don’t know that many Lindens (guess they prefer working instead of partying in world) and additionally everybody was quite busy (as also the Roundtable was on at that time which I missed due to that). One surprising thing to me was though that Linden employees also seem to experience lag So I got to see Jeska, Ben (who showed me around), Vektor, Jean, Cube, Jesse and later on Dan and Joe. Offices are quite nice but of course just offices
I also got to sign the resident board and have a photo of that which I hope turned out well.
Thursday evening we then went to Dia de los muertos, which is a parade performed by the latin-american inhabitants of San Francisco and which turned out to be great (photos are following)! I liked quite a lot more than Halloween which turned out to be just 100.000 standing around while the parade was latin-american music, customes and later on altars.
If your are in San Francisco at that time in year I just can recommend it. And again lots of Plone folks around
Before I left this afternoon I again visited Linden Lab to meet up with Glenn Linden who is responsible for the developer program. Great guy Unfortunately I did not meet Philip so that I didn’t had a chance to tell him that I want my money back (no detailed idea on why I would want that but I guessed that it is a common claim and so I just want to join) but I hope I will come back someday and do that
So now I am on my flight back and quite exhausted. I am looking forward to being back in my small historic town, relaxing and looking at my work pile which waits for me there
Photos can be found on my Real Life flickr account (Seatte set and San Francisco set).
I will follow up with probably some posting on what I’ve learned from that streaming project at the conference.
Technorati Tags: community, diary, lindenlab, plone, Real Life, Second Life, secondlife, Tao Takashi, taotakashi
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