ApacheCon starts on Wednesday, but Monday and Tuesday are filled with the Hackathon, Apache Barcamp and training sessions. Today I attended the Media and Analyst Training run by Sally Khudairi of Halo Worldwide. Sally has a very impressive list of clients and is a member of the ASF, so when the opportunity arose to attend one of her training sessions I jumped at it.
I was lucky enough to meet Sally at the ApacheCon EU planning meetings so I already had a feel for what to expect from her. I was excited when I arrived for the training at 10am.
It wasn’t long before I decided that the decision to miss out on the Hackathon in order to attend this training session was the right one. Not only would this training benefit my work within the ASF, but it was clearly going to help my work with OSS Watch. In fact I quickly decided to use OSS Watch as my test case during the training, rather than the two top level and two incubating ASF projects which get attention from me.
The highlight of the training, for me, was the chance to have a short briefing with Michael Coté of RedMonk, the open source analyst firm. Having the opportunity to bring all the mornings hints and tips to bear on delivering a real (if slightly artificial) briefing for a highly respected analyst like Coté was extremely useful. Now that I’ve met him I know I will be ensuring that he receives all relevant information from UK HE and FE open source as well as the ASF projects I work with.
The afternoon was taken up with writing some press materials and then having these critiqued by Sally and the group. This was a really useful exercise, I’ve written press releases before, indeed I’ve had many taken up by the press. However, this was the first time that I’ve had immediate, clear and concise feedback - invaluable!
Thanks to the ASF and to Sally for giving me this opportunity to learn further develop my skills.
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