SouthEast LinuxFest is June 11-13

Since this conference won’t be on the radar of most readers of this blog, I thought I’d wave its banner. The SouthEast LinuxFest is June 11-13 in Spartanburg, SC.

I attended the inaugural SELF conference last year, and I was blow away by the enthusiasm of the attendees and the quality of the speakers. This year the conference is significantly bigger, covering 3 days (last year it was one), more tracks, an Ubucon and a DrupalCamp. And in the spirit of open source, it’s still free to attend. You can opt for a supporter registration, which is $65 and nets you a t-shirt, lunch, and some drink tickets, but that’s entirely optional. You can attend the whole conference without paying a cent, which is brilliant. It shows the free model can be as successful for conferences as it has been for software, and hopefully it will inspire other conferences to follow suit. I registered as a supporter both last year and this year; had it been a traditional flat-fee conference I might not have gone last year. I think having registration fees optional makes you feel less like you’re going to work and more like you’re participating in a community.

I didn’t see anything GIS related on the agenda this year (last year there was a good OpenStreetMap session), but if* If you have any interest in open source software or tech in general I can’t say enough good things about this conference. Attend if you can - you’ll be glad you did.

*Correction: The speaker coordinator for SELF saw this post, had a cancellation, and now I’m doing a open source GIS presentation.