At the last eLiberatica, I was talking to some of the speakers, and several of us reflected that while we really enjoyed giving the standard, “speak up and monopolize everyone’s attention for 20 minutes, then take 5 minutes of questions”, given the energy in the crowd, we’d be really keen, in general, to have less cathedral and more bazaar at open source conferences as a rule.

OSCON is coming up, and of the mainstream conferences it’s been quite friendly to the less commercial “unconferences”, while still being a very worthwhile event in its own, conferency way. A few points to note:

• Dan Mosedale and I will be giving a talk about Thunderbird, and we expect you all to be there, and to walk away with confidence in the future of Thunderbird, because you will also walk away with some action items!
• I’m on the program committee for OSCON, so I get to share this 15% off discount code on my blog. How cool is that? os08pgm is the word of the day.
• Zak Greant is leading an unconference at OSCON on the topic of how do we transfer knowledge about community building and open source, just before we turn senile. I’ve told him I’d help lead a discussion, but I’m not sure what topic to cover. Anyway, it’s free, it’ll be fun, and you’ll get a chance to ask a bunch of experienced people