Attended Joel West’s session on standards and standardization, which was interesting (Although I am happy that my mother is not attending during my presentations as happened in one presentation). The room was friggin’ cold though, brrr.

Our presentation at the conference was also yesterday. The Open Source session was comparably crowded, about 25 persons attended. Matthias Stuermer did a very good job at presenting our stuff, and he managed to stay exactly within the given time with Swiss precision. Well done Matthias! Lot’s of questions and comments followed, however these were constructive and helpful, I got the impression that our study came across as credible and not boring.

I also like the other two presentation. Greg Madey looked at Sourceforge data, identifying social positions (using social networks and chi-square tests) from the distributions of the type of activity that persons did there.
Jay Asundi presented a comparative case study on the patch review process on the mailing lists of projects. While the results table looked very impressive, I was missng a little the next step: little conclusion was given, or implications discussed. However, he came there with his “guru’s wife”, a term and job description which I simply love.

In the evening, we went to dinner with Hala Annabi, our session chair. I had read many of her articles before but never actually met her. She is a charming, entertaining, friendly and very clever person and I thoroughly enjoyed the evening with her and Matthias. It was a great pleasure getting to know her.

Stefan Haefliger, please note that we got two potential presentation for our brown bag series: Kevin Crowston is in Zurich in May and Joel West will tour Europe the week after the Euram conference. Can you send them a mail, reminding them of the invitation and giving them some info on the brownbag series?

FUN FACT: It seems impossible to send e-mails from the hotel. The Mail server won’t give any error messages, but the e-mails won’t arrive. Neither Matthias nor me we able to send a mail using a mail client with the eth account or a private mail account. The only thing that work are web mail frontends. When Heidi had booked our Hotel room, the Hotel staff was also not able to send a confirmation e-mail to either her official or her private e-mail address. Weird. I guess they are being intercepted, printed out and George Bush just takes some time reading the pile before they are allowed through.