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JavaOne 2007 Day Zero

Posted by editor on May 7, 2007 at 12:49 PM EDT

Of community leaders, dark interviews, and the annual backpack

Java must be growing, because JavaOne has long since passed the point where it can be contained by a mere four days. On Saturday, a full three days before the General Session that "opens" JavaOne (CommunityOne and the J1 University notwithstanding), we held the third annual Community Leaders weekend in a Sun office on Third Street, two blocks down the street from Moscone.

Having to hold the event this early is somewhat problematic for those of us coming from out of town, but any closer to the start of the conference and we'd lose others to booth setup duty. So it's still pretty impressive that we can consistently fill our meeting room with 15-20 people over the course of the event.

This is one opportunity for the community leaders to tell the infrastructure team -- represented by Sun, Collabnet, and O'Reilly -- what they want to see from the site. A big topic this year was statistics: people want to know if and how often their projects are being downloaded, how that stacks up relative to other projects, etc. For us, the challenge is in integrating information from many sources, including our own databases (Sun, O'Reilly, and Collab, which operate different parts of the site), along with publicly-available data from sources such as Cenqua. A presentation at the weekend allowed us to share where we are with this effort and get feedback on what kind of data will be really useful to projects.

We also had discussions about raising project visibility, Collab's new issue tracker, new editorial directions for the front page, and more. Some of these things we can act on now, others we'll take home and implement post-JavaOne.

At the end of the day, I had a chance to do a brief podcast interview (and try out my new conferencing mic) with Jeff Kesselman, creator of Project Darkstar, a high-performance, low-latency server for the MMO game industry. About three minutes into the interview, the conference room's robo-lights went out, and instead of stopping (and making me do an edit later), we continued the interview in near-total darkness. "Darkstar" indeed...

Sunday was an open day for those not setting up booths, so I headed downtown and met a number of friends between Union Square and Moscone Center: former java.net editor (and ME podcaster) Daniel Steinberg (who made me spend money at Rasputin Records... twist my arm...), ME developer and writer Jonathan Simon, Aerith/AB5k creator/blogger Joshua Marinacci, his AB5k cohort Robert Cooper, Java Posse buckaroo Tor Norbye, Swing developer Chet Haase, etc. Most of us were in line -- or more accurately several lines -- to get our conference badge and backpack. For those keeping track, this year's backpack is silver, has some interesting closed side pockets, but does not seem to have a dedicated hole for sneaking out your iPod headphones. Anyways, we can compare backpack notes later.

Today, it's CommunityOne and more booth setup. Say "hi" if you see me down there.

On today's special all-JavaOne front page: Of community leaders, dark interviews, and the annual backpack
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