So I attended my first keysigning party. Basically it was a group of us free software geeks in a fantastic Belgian beer bar on W 4th Street near NYU named Vol de Nuit. Excellent place, excellent selection of Belgian beers. My new favorite is Corsendonk Brown Ale.
I ended up meeting an interesting array of folks, and got key signatures for Debian guys as well some other folks outside of Debian. Talking with Benjamin Hill (Mako) was interesting; he currently works for Ubuntu. Mako has been a Debian Developer since he was 12; quite a concept to wrap your mind around if you know what that means. Fun talk about free runtimes for Java(TM), and free software in general. It was truly a great time of hanging out with kindred spirits. Mako, another guy named Greg who actually serves as a lawyer for Debian, and myself kept hanging out after folks left, but I eventually had to bail and head back to the hotel and meet up with my wife. She was very understanding of how important this was to me, but I felt like more than 6 hours was a bit much.
If you don’t know about GPG keys, encryption, etc., I urge you to check it out. If you send sensitive data via email, GPG encryption can give you peace of mind. GnuPG is a free, open source implementation of the security offered commercially by PGP. You can establish quite secure trusts between individuals and send encrypted emails that can greatly improve the privacy of your electronic transmissions.