[yocto-ab] AB proposal: sending Kevin Strasser to Barcelona

[Osier-mixon, Jeffrey]

Hi all,

Kevin Strasser has been an Intel intern for several months, working on
the Yocto Project. One of his duties has been to create a Yocto
Project demo for the booth at ELCE/LinuxCon in Barcelona - the amazing
blimp that we discussed in the last AB meeting. To that end, he
refitted a 3-meter model blimp with an embedded board and a camera and
rebuilt the base station, so now the Yocto Project has an incredible
demo - a flying blimp, autonomous or controllable remotely, with an
on-board streaming camera. The blimp's board is ARM-based (Gumstix)
while the base station is based on an Intel Atom, showing the
diversity of the project and its commitment to architecture
agnosticism. The software is completely open source and available in a
Yocto Project repository. I predict it will be a huge hit in
Barcelona.

Kevin, as the creator of both the blimp electronics and software,
knows it intimately. Having him available in Barcelona allows the
technical expert on the meta-meson project to be present to run the
demo and discuss how it was pulled off, reflecting positively both on
the Yocto Project and on Linux. In the booth he can certainly describe
repeatedly his process to develop the blimp. Having him there will not
only bring that layer's creator in contact with people who may want to
create their own layers (and will be impressed that a college student
could do this) but will also free up higher-profile Yocto Project
engineers from having to explain it repeatedly, so they can explain
higher-level things to other people. Not to mention, no one knows the
project as well as Kevin.

In short, I think we could gain quite a lot from having him there. He
can also lend a hand at Dev Day.

I propose dedicating some of the 2012 Community travel funds to bring
Kevin to Barcelona to represent the Yocto Project's blimp demo. A Yes
or No vote over the next two days would be very helpful.

thanks
-- 
Jeff Osier-Mixon http://jefro.net/blog
Yocto Project Community Manager @Intel http://yoctoproject.org