[oe] OEDEM Report

[Michael 'Mickey' Lauer]

The 1st annual OpenEmbedded Developers
European Meeting has taken place from
5th to 8th of October, 2006 in Berlin.

I want to thank Holger 'Zecke' Freyther
and Henning 'Woglinde' Heinold for the
local organization -- it was a pleasant
event and we all enjoyed ourselves.

It was an open meeting and the following
people found their way to the conference
venue:

Florian Boor
Holger 'Zecke' Freyther
Tomas Frydrych
Henning 'Woglinde' Heinold
Marcin 'Hrw' Juszkiewicz
Koen Kooi
Michael 'Mickey' Lauer
Richard 'RP' Purdie
Rolf 'Laibsch' Leggewie

There were 8 sessions cramped within
only two days which made the schedule
very tight -- but we managed to stay
reasonably on topic and on time. The actual
program time was slightly enhanced to
cover the major part between 10:00 and 19:00
with only short but regular pauses in between.

Most of the sessions had a (small) presentation
part and a (larger) discussion part. The basic idea
was to identify key issues and proposals
which then should be discussed in the more broad
forum of this mailing list.

The session chairs will therefore launch
specific RFCs on the mailing list in the
near future (i.e. the next couple of days).

The following is a brief summary of each and
every session from OEDEM'06:

* 1th Session: OE Survey Results [Marcin]

Results of OE Survey were discussed and some subjects for next sessions 
were added. Topics included mailing lists, a stable branch, bug days
and 
OE policies.

* 2nd Session: OE Steering [Richard and Mickey]

Various current issues for OE were discussed and some proposals were
made. There was overlap with other sessions but topics included mailing
lists, MAINTAINERS, a stable branch, bug days and OE policies. RFC
documents and/or summaries of the discussions will follow.

* 3rd Session: BitBake Steering [Richard]

We considered bitbake's past, present and possible futures. In summary,
we're pleased with the current position but identified current problems
and priorities for future development. 

* 4th Session: OE Book [Mickey]
Mickey presented the motives and a preliminary
table of contents for his upcoming book
"Developing and Building Software for Embedded Linux"
(find the slides here).

* 5th Session: OE PR Launch 2007 [Marcin and Mickey]
We will look into being much more present
on conferences next year. We want to produce
a "conference kit" that contains the most
important things usable for people presenting
OE.

We will definitely be present at FOSDEM 2007 with
an own booth and two presentations in the Embedded Room.

The entry page of the openembedded.org website
has been adjusted to make it more clear
what OE is about, how to get it, how to use it,
and how to contribute to it.

* 6th Session: OE and the community [Koen]

This session was largely about how users perceive various aspects of OE.
We discussed the look and feel of various OE webservices and looked at
areas of
improvement. We also talked about things that are confusing to users,
like the
MAINTAINER field. We are going to work on those areas together with the
users.

* 7th Session: OE and commercial activities [Florian]

As there are multiple commercial organisations using OE and this
with multiple commercial interests, it would be very useful to define
strict rules about how to behave and to document the most important
things
that should be avoided to support OE and commercial activities.

The OpenEmbedded project itself does not intend to do any business
itself in the future.

* 8th Session: OE Registered Association [Holger and Henning]

During this session we discussed if and how a registered association
could help improving and increasing the usage of OpenEmbedded.
We have discussed which goals and tasks such an association should have
and how and where to setup such an entity.


-- 
Regards,

Michael 'Mickey' Lauer | FreeLancer | http://www.Vanille-Media.de