Planet Midgard: Archive

Last week I’ve participated in leading Russian free software conference “Protva” in Obninsk. Obninsk is a city ~180km away from Moscow where first civil nuclear reactor was made (it is still in use) and Protva is a nearby river. Free software developers all around CIS countries come to Obninsk every year since 2003 to talk and listen to talks of their fellows from different projects. Since then it became one of main regular technical conferences in Russia. The conference also co-located in space and time with LinuxFest, camping festival of free software followers, which is held since 1999 ~40 km away from Obninsk on shores of Protva.

I’ve been participating in programming committee of the conference for several years and quality of talks increases with each release. This year the conference was officially endorsed by the Ministry of IT and Communications of Russia, we were addressed by the Minister and secretary of Ministry’s working group on Free Software has given a long talk on how to program governmental machine to execute proper instructions (how to make government more free software-savvy in laws and in reality). The talk was very well received.

I had also my own talks. One was dedicated to the work we do at Samba Team on Clustered Samba (http://ctdb.samba.org/) and another one was about Midgard Project.

The latter one should have been delivered by Henri Bergius, Midgard Project leader, but he was unable to come in and I played his role though I have mustaches instead of his beard and my belly is a bit more noticeable. Oh, and I don’t drive a motorcycle but that wasn’t a problem in the conference hall. :-)

The Midgard talk was in fact dedicated to a phenomena of project’s survival through .com boom and fall out, and recycling of development team. Our main thesis is based on the mgd_social_life() function. The API interfaces are important, good API is hard to achieve, bad API is easier to implement and nightmare to get rid of. One of most important parts of API of free software project is its social behavior APIs. I personally think that by treating whole Midgard community as personal family we were able to survive these 9 years.

The talk was very well received. It appears that there were people who started their career in CMS world from Midgard and who are grateful to us for ideas and friendliness. Also, we announced two Midgard-based free software web-projects that were launched in Russia: FOSSPlanet, our Russian-speaking free software developers planet, and OpenPOWER Russia (I told about it already in December). Both projects use Midgard and Midcom for their interfaces, and are targeted developers audience.

I’ve also been busy on documenting the conference this year. We did video and audio recordings, and now working on conversion of them to more compact format. All materials are being uploaded to ftp://ftp.altlinux.org/pub/people/ab/protva07/ and I hope to get everything published by August, 10th.

Oh, by the way, the conference was held completely in Russian, so if you wondered where to get decent Russian material to learn the language, you’re welcome to listen to us. :-)