POSSCON Plans Next Week

    I will be attending POSSCON in Columbia next Friday, March 25. Since it's the last day, not a lot is going on unfortunately, but it's the only reasonable day my schedule can allow. They're having two workshops that day (and lunch!), so I'm planning to attend the ones on OpenOffice and the history of linux.
   I actually use OpenOffice all the time (even though Office 2010 looks pretty nice, but won't run under wine), so learning more about the suite and what I could do to help improve it would be awesome.
David Both is hosting this workshop, so he be will one of the speakers I'd like to approach. I'm not really sure yet what kind of questions to ask him besides the usual "how do I get involved?" and "how can OpenOffice make my life easier?", but I'm sure after the workshop, I'll have some other relevant topics to address.
   The second workshop is on the history of Linux, again something I use everyday, and is hosted by Jon "maddog" Hall. With a nickname like "maddog" how could you NOT want to meet him? Also, as someone who seems to have been there since the beginning of (CS) time, he would be a good person to ask where he thinks Linux and open source are headed in the future.
   Hopefully all the speakers will stick around for the final day, and will be easily identifiable. Other possible candidates to harass would be Walter Bender, the co-founder of Sugar Labs and One Laptop Per Child, or even better, David Nalley, whose name we've seen before because he is involved with the Math4 project. While the Math4 project is a good idea in theory, it really doesn't seem to be picking up as much as its developers had originally hoped. Sugar Labs and OLPC seem more likely to hold out longer into the future, and I really like the idea of sending internet-enabled laptops to developing countries as a means of educating the people there, starting with the children. I would definitely be interested in learning about more ways to get involved with OLPC and in general how we can use technology to make education more accessible to everyone.