Starting our JavaOne 2008 preparations, with Sarah's pictures from previous years

On the infrastructure and community leads calls, we've started putting together our plans for JavaOne 2008. If you're familiar with our J1 presence in previous years, you know more or less what to expect, so here are some deltas: the booth number is 101, it's all the way to one side of the pavilion floor this year, and this year's booth is 25 x 50 feet, which will give project owners and community leads more demo space, which will be useful for things like Bruce Boyes' robotics demos.

Now, for everyone else, I'd like to give you a visual impression of our JavaOne activities, and since a picture is worth a proverbial thousand words, I'll enlist help from Site Producer and doer-of-all-things Sarah Kim and her Flickr photos.

This is the community leaders weekend, a meeting held in advance of JavaOne that lets the community leaders interact face to face with each other and with the java.net infrastructure team (representatives from Sun, O'Reilly, and Collabnet). The above picture is me from two years (and about 40 pounds) ago, presenting an overview of the front page elements and how each is meant to generate interest in different parts of our projects and communities.

I think that was also the year that Bruno introduced Juggy, the Java Finch, to the group.

Anyways, the community leaders weekend is held in an unconference format, so we're able to discuss and adapt to whatever agenda attendees bring to the event. This year's will be held on Saturday, May 3 (optionally extending into Sunday... a "game time decision" we typically make on Saturday afternoon), and community leaders are invited to sign up on the Community Leaders Weekend wiki page.

A few days of setup later, the pavilion opens and you'll find us at the java.net booth. The design of the booth offers counters at one end where community leads, project owners, and other community members can meet with colleagues, show off their stuff, answer questions, etc.

You can now sign up to staff that side of the booth on the Pod Staffing Signups portion of the Community Corner wiki page. And as JavaOne approaches, keep an eye on that schedule to see when your community leads will be there, so you can meet like-minded community members and peers.

Along with the talk at the pods and some couches in the middle of the booth for informal chats and laptop recharging, our other major attraction is the mini-talks.

These talks are 20-minute eyes-forward, conference-type talks, about your project, your community, some topic of interest to your community, etc... take a look at last year's talks to get an idea of the scope of the mini-talks. The booth provides amplified sound for your talk, a large plasma screen for displaying your slides, and has seating for 20-30 people, depending on arrangement. The talks are recorded and are sent out later as the Community Corner podcast. If you're interested, you can propose a mini-talk now by posting a title and abstract to the wiki at your preferred time, and getting it approved by a community leader.

So, that's your virtual tour of java.net's activities at JavaOne. I hope we'll see you there in May to talk about your projects and what we can do to help further build the community.

Oh, and thanks to Sarah for the great pictures.