The Itsme expedition has just come back from Bruxelles, where I and three other developers from the Tech team had a great time at FOSDEM 2010.
After a friday evening spent sightseeing that wonderful city, on saturday morning we reached the ULB Campus and joined the party with hundred of techies. It’s been hard to choose which talks to follow among the huge schedule, composed by 200+ lectures spread in dozen of rooms, and in the end we attended many talks more or less related to the Itsme universe: some of us preferred Drupal, some others Mozilla, we dropped for a bit in the Embedded-related and KDE-related spaces, and we couldn’t miss the inevitable talk by Andrew Tanenbaum.
However, the main reason of the trip was the invitation by Rob Taylor (CEO at CodeThink) and Philip Van Hoof (developer of the Tracker project) to get involved in the talk about SPARQL and the semantic desktop. In this occasion I had to speak about the FSter filesystem and its internal architecture: how SPARQL queries are generated and how data and metadata from the Tracker store are retrieved and mixed to map a hierarchy of files and folders. It seems our recently opened project is gaining momentum in the community, and we are happy our work is useful somewhere else.
Outside the FOSDEM rooms I can share with Rob and Philip our plans to integrate e-mail management with Tracker, and it appears our current implementation produced both positive and negative feedback: we hope to continue talking in near future, in order to collect more suggestions and improvements from those highly skilled guys.
With the backpack filled by nerdy t-shirts, many missing sleeping hours and some funny anecdotes to share with friends, we end our adventure and start another cycle of heavy development.
Tags: conference, event, fosdem, fosdem2010, fster
Hope you also showed our prototype around to interested people
If not, I think they’ll have a chance to see something soon, right? 
Nice pictures!
Who was the guy with the fancy hat?
@Marco: no, we cannot show the prototype around, we were too busy in selecting talks from the schedule and look for our talk companions
@Alessandro: I took that photos, you can find more stupid shots in my Flickr page ( http://www.flickr.com/photos/robertoguido/ )
Well, the important thing is telling people we have a cool prototype ready