Last week I had the privilege to chat via IM with Orv Beach, the Publicity Chair for the Southern California Linux Expo, about how SCALE uses FLOSS to productively plan and implement their event. SCALE is currently one of the biggest Linux conferences in the US…but I’ll let Orv fill you in on rest. This year’s Expo will be February 20th - 22nd, 2009. Find out more at the official website.

Orv Beach is the Publicity Chair for SCALE

PL: Orv, thanks so much for taking the time talk to me about how the organizers of SCALE use OSS to productively plan and implement a large scale conference!
Orv Beach: I’m very happy to do so!
PL: Can you tell us in a few sentences exactly what SCALE is, and what your roll is in the whole thing?
Orv Beach: SCALE is the Southern California Linux Expo. It’s a regional show highlighting Open Source Software.
SCALE grew out of a series of "LUGFests" put on by the Simi-Conejo Linux Users Group in the early part of this decade. They were hosted at the Nortel facility in Simi Valley (now defunct). They were held in the Nortel cafeteria every 6 month, and by LUGFest IV, had grown to two days, and 400 visitors. Even back then we knew that a mix of commercial and community content was the way to go.

After Nortel closed, we started looking around for a way to continue the community education that had drawn so many interested people. About 18 months later, we held the first SCALE at USC. It was a single-day event, drawing about 400 people. It’s grown steadily from there. It’s now a 3-day event, and last year drew 1,400 people. And the draw is not just regional anymore - a significant number of our attendees come from outside of California.

PL: Wow, that sounds like quite a journey over the years. So you’ve been involved since the beginning?
Orv Beach: Yes. I’ve been a member of the Simi-Conejo LUG since 1999, I think. At the time, I was the Information Systems Manager at the Nortel facility in Simi, and offered a room to SCLUG for their meetings. It grew from there. I’m currently the Publicity Chair for SCALE, BTW.

PL: Okay, cool. What are your specific responsibilities as Publicity Chair?
Orv Beach: Some of the obvious duties: Gather information about Expo activities (location, date/time, speakers, schedule), and make that known to the community via various outlets : mailing lists, newsletters, web sites, banner ads, etc. I oversee the web site, and generate most of the content on it, via the SCALE blog.

I and other SCALE chairs are interviewed from time to time on various news outlets (podcasts, IRC, IM, and actual radio shows) . We (the chairs) also interview various members of the FOSS community for information that might be of interest to the community at large. Generally those interviewees are going to be people or groups that will be attending the next SCALE, but not always.

I also oversee the creation of the SCALE hardcopy program that’s handed out to attendees. I think that’s it; I may think of more later :-) Oh yeah - generate ad copy…
PL: Sounds like you have a lot on your plate! Are you a volunteer, or is this part of your day job as well?
Orv Beach: Everyone who works on the So Cal Linux Expo is a volunteer. My day job is as an IT director at a local hospital. We do this because we believe in Open Source software, and want to educate EVERYONE about it :-D
PL: Totally awesome. Balancing all of this must be challenge. How do you do it, and does Linux/FLOSS play important role in your personal productivity?
Orv Beach: It IS a challenge, no doubt, as we all have day jobs and family priorities. Fortunately, we get better at it as time goes on, and so we’re more productive with our time.
Orv Beach: FLOSS - we’ve been FLOSS only at home for about 5 years now. That’s leroy, my Kubuntu workstation, stupid-computer, my wife’s Fedora workstation, and fs2, the Centos file server , and I have an old Dell laptop with Kubuntu on it for the grandkids.
Orv Beach: They like playing games, of course.
PL: Of course :)
Orv Beach: I use OpenOffice for documents. But for SCALE collaboration, we use online apps: google docs is one.
We use Mediawiki for a lot of documentation. Mailman for the low-volume mailing lists, and poMMo (http://pommo.org/Main_Page) for the high-volume scale-announce mailing list. For communications: the usual suspects: Thunderbird and Evolution clients (with sendmail inbetween, of course) Also IRC, IM, and XMPP/Jabber.

We use an Asterisk server for phone conferences and voice mail. We use SugarCRM for tracking interactions with sponsors, exhibitors and vendors, as well as some email campaigns. We have a homegrown registration application that is written using Python, Django, and MySQL. One area that we haven’t managed to convert to FOSS is graphics; we tried using Scribus several years ago to create the hard-copy program, but at that time it wasn’t robust enough to use. We’ll probably revisit that in the future. We also use WebERP for accounting. So we’re almost completely OSS at SCALE, which is what you’d expect ;-)

PL: Yes, definitely! So I noticed that you guys are using Google Docs for some collaborative document authoring. Have you taken a look at Zimbra? I know it was bought by Yahoo, but I think it is still OSS.
Orv Beach: We know of Zimbra, but our current needs are met with sendmail running on our domain. Common calendaring is something we might want to look at in the future.
Orv Beach: Stu Sheldon is our tech committee chair, and does a wonderful job supporting SCALE. He runs our servers, including Asterisk, and every year puts together an industrial-strength network for the Expo at the hotel. And does it in a day with volunteers!
PL: Definitely. It’s really a testament to the quality of OSS and the supporting community that you can organize and implement a conference like this running 99% free software.
Orv Beach: - side note - you never know WHAT someone is going to plug into your network, so you have to be as robust as possible. Stu accomplishes that by giving EACH booth its own VLAN. We had about 99% network uptime during SCALE 6.
PL: That’s amazing. I’ve heard that keeping a network up for events like this can be really challenging. On a personal level, are you a todo list kind of guy? How do you keep all your responsibilities organized?
Orv Beach: It’s hard - I HATE having things fall through the cracks. I’ve always had to rely on to-do lists. The problem is, the list is never with you (I’m not a PDA kind of guy). Recently, I’ve put a to-do applet on a person iGoogle page. It has a page for SCALE to-dos, and a page for household to-dos. It’s working pretty well so far.
Orv Beach: And, for SCALE, I reorganized our wiki last year, and moved the activities we do for EVERY SCALE into a common area. (That’s data that doesn’t change from year to year: contact info, promo codes, etc. )
PL: I can see how having that centralized wiki is really helpful. Now is this a strictly internal wiki or is it public as well?

Orv Beach: It’s an internal wiki. We put a lot of "not ready for prime time info" in there.
PL: Naturally. I love to hear about organizations using tech like this. I’m not in the tech field, so it’s a struggle to get people using something like a wiki…if only they knew how helpful it can be!
Orv Beach: Well, Mediawiki has a challenging markup language; I’m only active in it about 3 months out of the year, and I have to relearn it almost from scratch every year.

This year we switched our website from homegrown to Drupal. The learning curve was challenging but we’re getting there. I think we’ll start retaining data in the Drupal CMS from year to year going forward.
We’ve looked at things like WebGUI, but haven’t made any decisions yet. The WYSIWYG editor in Drupal makes data entry fairly painless, so that’s a plus for it.
PL: Does the SCALE team make any use of the microblogging services like Twitter or Identi.ca?
Orv Beach: Some of us use it, but not for SCALE-related communications. Most of our realtime chat is done via an IRC channel. And we have an open channel #scale-chat on irc.oftc.net, for anyone who’d like to chat with us.
PL: Obviously there are many different applications and lot of cool OSS tech that goes into making something like this happen, but if you could name one piece of OSS that you felt is absolutely integral to SCALE, what would it be?
Orv Beach: At this point, it would have to be Drupal - but remember it’s written in PHP, rides on top of Apache, which rides on top of Linux. So they’re all OSS, they all interlock and they’re ALL needed!

PL: And to me that just makes it even cooler. From the ground up OSS is really what propels the SCALE team’s work flow.
Orv Beach: Absolutely - we couldn’t run SCALE without Free and Open Source Software. So, for the majority of things, we "eat our own dog food." ;-) We practice what we preach. :-)
PL: I love that…and like I said before, the fact that you do what you do with OSS speaks volumes. That being said, could you elaborate a bit on areas where OSS does fall short for SCALE? Are there situations closed-source software is the more productive choice for you?
Orv Beach: Yes - several years ago we attempted to create the hard-copy Expo program with Scribus. At that time, it wasn’t stable enough to do it, so we moved to some commercial graphics programs under OS X. We’d like to revisit that someday though. I believe that’s the only area where OSS falls short for us, at this time.
PL: Regarding your to do list system…I love that it is so simple. One list for work, one for home. I know lots of people (my self included) that use complex categories, contexts, and the like to organize our lists…and many times we don’t need to! Are there other components to your todo system?
Orv Beach: No, not really. The SCALE list has all of my SCALE PR items on it. It has not only my items, but the ones I’ve farmed out to my volunteer staff. I leave them on there until I know they’ve been completed. Fortunately, the to-do applet I’m using on iGoogle has some rudimentary priorities, which I use. It’s saving grace is that I can get to it from anywhere.
PL: That’s really excellent. Do you also use Google Calendar for appointments, etc.?
Orv Beach: Yes, but not a dedicated calendar. I put my daytime SCALE ‘appointments’ on my work calendar. For evening events, I put them on a Google Calendar that my wife and I share. That way I know if I’m scheduled for grandkid-sitting or something at the same time ;-)

PL: I love the easiness of collaborating with Google Calendar. Is your work calendar a paper-based system, or Exchange, or something else?
Orv Beach: I work for Adventist Health, and like many hospitals, we use Novell’s GroupWise for our email and calendaring. Over the years, I’ve used Lotus Notes, Microsoft Exchange and Groupwise, and I actually prefer GroupWise. And it comes with a Linux client :-D
PL: Nice! That’s what I like to hear. How does Groupwise compare to say, Novell’s Evolution?
Orv Beach: I haven’t used Evolution in a couple of years, but they’re roughly similar; integrated mail and calendar, with busy search on the calendar, etc.
PL: That’s great that you’re able to be Linux-based in virtually everything you do.
Orv Beach: I’ve been using Linux for a long time; I can do just about everything in it. Fortunately, it’s improving steadily, and has gotten to the point where that applies to almost any computer user :-)
PL: You’re very right. I think one thing that’s really holding a lot of people back is really good Exchange support. It’s just hard to get working right now, and many companies and individuals are just locked in. ;(
Orv Beach: Yeah, and that lock-in is what you want to avoid. Once in there, it’s REALLY hard to break out.
PL: SO true. Well Orv, I just want to say thanks so much for talking with me today. It’s really been fun AND educational! :)

Orv Beach: Thank YOU, Nathan.

I was also able to get some statements from Matthew Gallizzi, the webmaster for SCALE, and he had this to say about the Drupal content management system:

In one sentence, Drupal’s power has allowed us to be more efficient and productive in our work.

Specifically, some of the two most useful modules we utilize are CCK and
Views. CCK stands for Content Construction Kit. It is what allows me to
build forms and take in user data. Views then allows me to display the
data in just about any way you can imagine. Tie that with CSS(link) (Cascading Style Sheets), and I can
dynamically control the output and display of any content that was
inputted into the system with CCK.  We use this for our speakers,
sponsors, exhibitors, and dotorg booths. This is what makes us more
productive. Previously we were putting data in a wiki and I would then manually transfer the data to the website.

Cool stuff! I know OSS is certainly essential for the activities and events that I plan…I use everything from TiddlyWiki, to OpenOffice Impress, to various OSS calendaring solutions to keep everything straight. I think it’s awesome that something of this scale (no pun intended…. :) is doable with FLOSS. How does your your organization use Free Software?