LinuxFest Northwest 2015 Will be Held April 25 and 26 (Video)

Video LinuxFest Northwest 2015 Will be Held April 25 and 26 (Video) 21

Posted by Roblimo on Friday December 19, 2014 @04:14PM from the the-coolest-conference-in-our-country's-upper-left-hand-corner dept.

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Their website says, 'Come for the code, stay for the people! We have awesome attendees and electrifying parties. Check out the robotics club, the automated home brewing system running on Linux, or the game room for extra conference fun.' This is an all-volunteer conference, and for a change the volunteers who run it are getting things together far in advance instead of having sessions that don't get scheduled until a few days before the conference, which has happened more than once with LFNW.

So if you have an idea for a session, this is the time to start thinking about it. Sponsors are also welcome -- and since LFNW sponsorships regularly sell out, it's not to soon to start thinking about becoming a sponsor -- and if you are part of a non-profit group or FOSS project, LFNW offers free exhibit space because this is a conference that exists for the community, not to make money for a corporate owner. But don't delay. As you can imagine, those free exhibit spots tend to fill up early. (Alternate Video Link)

Robin Miller: Jakob Perry has been working on LinuxFest Northwest literally his entire adult life and then some. And it’s one of the great Linux shows, not huge, not small, just a good size. And it’s not for a good while yet but we thought just for once we tell you about it and discuss how you can become a sponsor, how you can become a speaker and then of course how to attend. So take it away Jakob Perry. Sir?

Jakob Perry: Well, thank you for the intro there. Yeah, so LinuxFest, we are going on our 16th year, which is actually more than half of my life. We started back in the year 2000; I know I am a little kid. And so we are going on our 16th year and pretty much the same as always, but a few cool little things we are going to be adding this year. We have a few tracks where it’s currently planning. We have Postgres doing a dedicated track. We have a growing makers group last year, there was a new makers development company in Bellingham that started really getting into 3D printing and so we expect to see that grow this year at LinuxFest.

We will be covering all the latest and greatest in Linux news and Linux happenings. And the way we do that is by getting your feedback, because it truly is an open source conference where we are powered by the community. So that’s how you submit your sessions by going to the website and get your sessions on there. We have a few tracks that are available and you can choose which one may fit the best for you and then we plan to get it out mid-February-ish, so the due date is I believe the end of January. And so we need to get those in by then. And then we will publish the schedule early this year, so people know what to expect.

For those who have been to LinuxFest in the past, usually our schedule gets announced about two days before the fest. But this year, we are really focusing on getting that schedule out beforehand and that really requires that members and people who want to submit actually get us their sessions a little bit earlier, because in the past we – I think last year we set a record. We had someone chime in 48 hours beforehand. So yeah, not doing that this year, so.

Robin Miller: Let’s talk about sponsors. One of your cohorts posted on LinkedIn to -- I guess -- a few contacts including myself, and said, 'Hey we are going to try to do things earlier instead of last minute this year. So talk to me about sponsors. Who should sponsor, who should they talk to, and by when?'

Jakob Perry: Yeah. So funnily enough, actually due to our raging success, we can’t accept sponsorship until January 1st. So sponsorship opens on January 1st and we will close as early as possible depending on who we get and we have seen the last few years our sponsorships have been closing earlier and earlier. So they have been selling out. We have sponsorships everywhere from large corporate sponsors like SUSE and Red Hat and even our good friends at Microsoft to small companies in Washington state or little startups.

We have something for everyone really. And there's two major categories, the gold and silver where we have tables available, so we have a 10-foot booth for our more corporate sponsors, or for our maker set, the company I talked about earlier, they set up their whole booth there. We also have a smaller set for our silver sponsors, just a five-foot booth, so you can actually just come there and tell people what your company or your organization is about.

And then we also have our community non-profit which unlike most conferences we actually do for free and most people get in, we have to sometimes have people split the booth depending on how many people apply. And then lastly we have our bronze sponsorships which is basically a website and listing at the conference, but it doesn’t include a seat. So, if you are looking for like an easy way to get your name up and get yourself lunch and a t-shirt for two participants, $150 can get me in for a bronze sponsorship.

Robin Miller: How many people usually attend?

Jakob Perry: So usually, as we’ve gotten our accounts a little bit better over the last few years, last year we were amazed, we had 900 people pre-registered so we thought we would have may be 1000 or 1200 people, but at the end of the conference we had 1575 people actually go through our registration area. And registration is not required so that could mean we even have more people who actually just showed up. So it is not a small conference, that’s actually bigger than Linux World has been. So, about 1,500 to 1,600 people is what we estimate for this year as well.

Robin Miller: And the minimum buy-in is $150, gosh that’s less than $0.10 a head, can't beat it, right?

Jakob Perry: That’s right. And what’s unique about LinuxFest is, we have very low overhead, our biggest costs are really in the after party and our lunch sort of, we actually charge for lunch and we have been doing some things to try improve that, but the amount of people we have makes it really hard for us to actually do a sponsored lunch. But, if anyone wants to spend $10,000 to give us lunch, it’s really hard when our largest sponsorship is for our Saturday night party which is $3,000, when our gold is a $1,000 and silver is $500 to really do that.

And I am really excited that LinuxFest works because of Bellingham Technical College which gives us the whole facility for virtually free, and so, with that we are able to not only have the facility for free but we get about 120 volunteers from their IT student teaching department and so they all help us set up the fest. I haven’t seen a better partnership like that and because of that we can keep our sponsorship cost pretty low, so your best bang for the buck is pretty good here.

Robin Miller: Now I just like to know one thing, many Slashdot readers and people accuse us of using these videos as sneaky ads and that we get paid for them. So, tell them: What percentage of this non-profit's zero income do we get?

Jakob Perry: That’s right. We are all volunteers and we are not paying for anything and we thank you for giving a blurb just out of good faith. It’s pretty awesome actually to be able to spread the word without having to pay people for it.

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