Cogito, Ergo Sumana for 2010 February

# 03 Feb 2010, 04:18PM: Change of Plans: Image nicked from Leo Antunes. (I thought about creating some sort of Belgian-waffle-with-a-NO-sign-on-it but this services.)

I'm not going to FOSDEM this year; change of plans. Perhaps next year.

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# (2) 05 Feb 2010, 11:48PM: Another Change: I'm no longer working with Collabora Ltd.

In the first several months after I joined Collabora in April 2009, I served as lead project manager, got the new website up, and started putting some new project management processes into place, especially in research and development. Then I shifted to personnel management, and created and began implementing a performance assessment system. All the while I gardened the wiki, aggregated and edited weekly internal reports to keep the company on the same page, blogged about our work, and generally gave people the information and the nagging they needed to make informed decisions. (In retrospect, I played facilitator, historian, and journalist a lot, plus mentor to 50+ Collaborans.)

Collabora's a different place than it was ten months ago; I helped move them from a startup to an enterprise footing. Management structures change as needs and capabilities become apparent, so the directors and new hires (including the awesome Martin Barrett) will carry this work forward, and I offer them my best wishes. I'm happy to talk more in detail about what I did at Collabora, especially if you're interested in what I can do for your organization.

In the near future, I'm taking some time to relax and take care of existing obligations before I incur new ones. Then, starting in late February or early March, I'll be volunteering fulltime on some open source/free culture projects for several months. I haven't yet decided which ones, or in what capacity, so feel free to recruit me.

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# (0) 07 Feb 2010, 10:09PM: Travel Plans: I'm setting up travel plans for the rest of the year. I'm about 95% certain I'm going to WisCon in Madison, Wisconsin in late May, although I need to find someone to room with (anyone have some spare floor at the Concourse?) and buy tickets. I submitted a talk to OSCON (Portland, Oregon, July 19-23) and I'll find out next month whether that got accepted. (OSCON is right after HOPE in NYC, which I really should check out.) I'm also thinking about going to WorldCon in Melbourne, Australia in early September, because I have a number of friends and acquaintances there, and when else will I have time plus multiple reasons to visit Melbourne? Since DebConf in early August is in New York City, I'll probably be there at least for the social bits.

And there are a metric zillion other events I'm at least somewhat interested in, from LibrePlanet to the Netbook Summit to QuahogCon to Open Source Bridge and the Community Leadership Summit. So this coming week I have to suss out what's quality, think up some strategy, and prep a bunch of talk proposals. If you want to suggest anything, please email or comment!

Right now I'm in Washington, DC, visiting my sister and enjoying the snow. Yesterday & today I accidentally visited ShmooCon because various DC-area geek women inveigled me into dinner, then some sort of "party," then oh Metro is closing early because of the snow, oh look, this person's hotel room has an empty second bed! And then breakfast and more hanging out and it's afternoon already? In more short-term travel plans, I'm hitting various promising sites to help me figure out whether I can get back to New York City tomorrow.

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