I’m here at the SouthEast LinuxFest in Spartanburg, SC. I arrived late Thursday night, technically Friday morning, and spent most of Friday setting up the Red Hat / opensource.com table and networking with folks. Last night, opensource.com sponsored the SELF pre-party at Marriott 299 Sports Bar. We made a lot of great friends.

The conference kicked off today with a keynote by Jon “Maddog” Hall who has over 40 years of commercial computer experience. He is an expert on the software industry and gave an excellent presentation on creating jobs with free software. You should check out his latest project, Project Cauã, which is focused on creating sustainable computing jobs in the developing world.

There looks like a lot of interesting sessions this afternoon–here are a few I’ve got my eye on:

• How can I contribute to open source?
• What education can (and can’t) learn from open source
• Teaching open source in colleges in universitires
• Community organizing for free software activists
• Taste great or less filling? Marketing an open source business
• Open source beyond the development model

Tomorrow there is a DrupalCamp at SELF. I’m looking forward to learning some new stuff on Drupal and sharing some knowledge about online community building during my session at 1:30pm.