From Wednesday through Sunday, I was in Los Angeles for the Southern California Linux Expo (Scale12x) held at the Hilton LAX. This was my first Scale12x and this was the second year that Mozilla had official presence.
To be honest, I’m not totally sure what I was expecting when going to Scale12x. I thought it was going to be a typical regional linux expo but Scale12x was a larger event then I could have imagined.
Thursday, I spent a lot of time meeting with Firefox Users and people from other open source projects. In the evening, I joined Brandon Burton (Mozilla), Chris Turra (Mozilla), Jordan Sissel (Elasticsearch) and Michael Stahnke (PuppetLabs) for a DevOps Dinner.
On Friday, I took the opportunity to visit a number of talks including Brandon Burton’s lightning talk during the DevOps track. I met up with Casey Becking, a fellow Mozilla Rep, and we hung out, visited some talks, and checked out the expo floor in advance of setup.
That evening myself, Casey Becking and Joanna Mazgaj went out for a Mozilla Group Dinner. We went to a place called Akbar in Marina Del Rey. The dinner was excellent and it was great to get together and spend time with fellow reps before the expo floor opened.
Saturday and Sunday were the days of the expo hall and I woke up about 6:00am and headed down to setup our booth early. By 9:00am we were starting to see the first attendees trickle in. I would estimate in the first few hours we saw close to five hundred attendees and by end of day closer to a thousand.
At one point, a group of students stopped by from L.A.’s Roosevelt High School and I gave them a short overview of Mozilla OpenBadges and discussed how their school could use the platform to recognize students for various achievements. The faculty the accompanied the students said they were very interested in the program.
There was a tremendous amount of interest surrounding Firefox OS I would say 90% or better of attendees that visited the booth demoed Firefox OS or asked questions. Many asked us when they could buy a device in North America.
To my knowledge we were only asked about Directory Tiles on two occasions. Both of those conversations were positive once we explained it some and pointed out Mitchell’s blog post.
Sunday was a bit slower since most attendees has visited the booth although some people who arrived last day for the expo did stop by and some attendees visited us again. All in all, the event was very positive and a lot of buzz was generated in addition to getting information out there about how to contribute to Firefox OS, where a device can be purchased, and the progress of the project.