OpenRheinRuhr 2016

openSUSE took part of the OpenRheinRuhr like every year. This year we were sponsor and I was the organisator of that and the booth. Additional to that I gave a presentation about the new release of openSUSE Leap 42.2. It was full and many people were interested for the news in the community. I do that yearly and openSUSE talks are standard there since 3 years. Many people are saying that I am not allowed to be missed as a Speaker. The second standard speaker of openSUSE is Axel. His talk was about SUSE Studio and GNU Health this year. We represent openSUSE with our talks at the OpenRheinRuhr.

img_0128At first all Contributors got their T-Shirts and the table should be full with marketing material. Christian and Simon were looking for our Customers during my presentation. All people laughed afer hearing I would be a Working Student at ownCloud now and we want to have a cooperation booth (openSUSE / ownCloud) next year, because I want to continue with oganizing. The question with 32 bit support popped up again and the audience was happy that we have got Tumbleweed for that. openSUSE in the Linux ranking and our plans were questions, too. Top Linux Speakers (from Germany) were in the audience. They are my new focus for marketing, because they can represent openSUSE during their presentations and are really enthusiastic.

After lunch Simon asked me whether he can go to talks. I said: „Of course! You are an Advocate and should learn here, too. There aren’t better options than talks during such events for getting qualified people for the booth. I know why I look after enough people for a booth (more than 2) during conferences and expos.“ Simon smiled, told us the times and used it for learning in 2 talks.

We have got new interested volunteers for openSUSE. One guy wants to join the heroes team and a woman wants to become an Advocate. Other distributions want to cooperate, too. Gentoo created pins with our logo for our fans. And fsfe came to us with their cloud stickers and shown us the normed SUSE cloud on their stickers. All were happy. We had a lot of fun!

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We had a conference party in the evening. We had so many sponsors that we were allowed to get free beer (for all) and grillables (for Contributors). Thanks to all sponsors! It was a nice evening.

The ZDF (Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen) was available at the second day. They went through the hall with their camera. Self filming (with webcam) in front of the ffmpeg booth was most interesting for them. I had to give ownCloud support and the webcam security (of openSUSE) was a highlight for customers. We were asked after our release day very often and I showed my presentation slides again and again. At the end Christian and I won books (Scrum and LibreOffice) at the tombola. The talk of Axel was successfully, too.

img_0133We enjoyed the OpenRheinRuhr and want to take part of such an Open Source event ( with a minimum of 2 talks) next year again. We know what we want to tell then, too. 😉

That was great!