Steve Milner and I (and many other great people from work) are looking at having an Open Source mini-conference one day in September in Raleigh — probably a Saturday. Details are still TBD, but watch this space. It won’t be specific to any vendor distribution, all comers are welcome, and we’re going to try to get some content that is equally interesting to a mix of RTP industry folk as well as local engineering students (also the reason for waiting until September). It will be good for those who might just be getting their feet wet or want to learn what Open Source contribution is all about, as well as having some deep technical topics for 1337 H@xx0Rz. No Mac topics, underwater basketweaving, or business proposals or anything fluffy like that (i.e. much more targetted than BarCamp) — just Open Source.
The working title is “Evil Robot Conference” because the name was catchier than any acronym that described it accurately.
If you are interested in hearing more, possibly speaking, wouldn’t mind sharing the word with your organization, or otherwise getting more involved, post up.
I suspect we’ll have a dedicated blog or something for it later.
What kind of topics will you be covering?
Will there be robots, punch, or pie at the meeting?
Ah, cool URL, are you local?
Topics, yes…. Any sort of open source free software topics (the name was just a name because OpenSoftwareConference or something similar would be very boring), but if you want to include actual robot content I am sure we would love to have it — provided the plans/code/ideas are open source friendly and such. A lot of us have interest in seeing computers do more than send bits, and many folks will probably be electrical/computer engineers too
This was started by a bunch of Red Hat operating systems / Linux guys, as an attempt to get more Free Software things happening in the Triangle. Computers not just sending bits is a good thing 
One of our goals is to teach new folks how to get involved in OSS and foster that sort of community. I am sure actual robotics software is compatible
Not sure about food — we are doing it on the cheap, sort of a recession special
We are probably going to do a 1.5 hour break for lunch (so you can hit Bojangles, etc) and maybe go to somewhere like Saucer afterwards. TBD!