Did you ever have one of those weeks where you look back at your life choices and wonder why you did what you did?
Oh, did I have one of those weeks.
It started when I discovered that the organizers of FOSDEM were posting their video content on YouTube this year—something they have not always done in the past.
During FOSDEM, I had the privilege of co-chairing the Community DevRoom with Laura Czajkowski of Couchbase for the second time. We got a much larger room this year (80 seats, up from 40 last year) and still had a packed house the entire day with a queue for seats reaching down the stairs for all talks.
We were also honored to hear from the organizers that they received unsolicited feedback from several attendees that the DevRoom was one of the best at the event and had a great mix of talks for both seasoned open source contributors and folks who were old hands in the tech world but new to open source or to FOSDEM.
You can check out all the talks, and videos have been posted for each one.
I hear what you’re thinking: it’s another developer conference. Because we don’t have enough of those. But the inaugural edition of DevConf.us should prove to be more than just another developer event.
That’s because its sibling event, DevConf.cz in Brno, Czech Republic, is nothing like your run-of-the-mill dev conference. So why should this latest offshoot conform to that mold, either?
Held on the campus of Boston University from August 17-19, 2018, DevConf.us follows in the footsteps of its original event, as well as its other companion event, DevConf.in in Bangalore, India, and brings unique flavor of conference to the shores of North America.
If you have never been to FOSDEM on the ULB Solbosch campus in Brussels before, let me try to sum it up in one sentence for you: over 8,000 free and open source developers and enthusiasts all seeking to learn as much as possible in as many ways as possible.
That really doesn’t do it justice. With more detail, I can also tell you that it is crowded, loud, and certainly populated by the most politically and socially diverse people I have ever seen in one place.
And I would not trade any visit for the world.
Summer is always a busy time in tech conference season, especially for the Open Source and Standards team. In the past few weeks, we have had team members in Japan, China, and Germany. Other community teams are busy too—today AnsibleFest happened in London, and last week the oVirt team was busy helping out with PyCon Israel.
There’s a little bit of a lull coming up, and several of us are taking breathers as we recover from the challenges of international travel. Right now, those challenges are fairly well-known: jet lag, language barriers, cultural differences… but there seems to be an uncertain future on the horizon, a future where travel may be potentially complicated by much greater forces, such as climate and geopolitical change.
As part of Stormy’s ongoing blog challenge, here’s my take on "Three best features of open source events."
Last month we ran a community blogging challenge on opensource.com. People really enjoyed both the writing prompts as well as hearing what others have to stay. Many expressed disappointment that the blogging challenge has ended, so we decided to bring it back! We want to hear what you have to say! We want to make sure that open source software communities have access to the best practices across all projects.
This week the focus is on events! For many of you, May was event month. ApacheCon, Open Stack Summit, OSCON, OSCAL, Read the Docs, Red Hat Summit, and PyCon are just a few of the events in May. So while you are thinking of them, what advice do you have for other open source software communities?
For some background I recommend you catch the earlier postings
Suitably refreshed after our conference dinner, our Thursday Keynote was Nadia Eghbal from GitHub. Her talk Consider the Maintainer looked at some of the issues when projects we all rely on may have a single maintainer or a single committer. If your organisation or project deeply relies on other Open Source projects you need to look at how you can support them, otherwise there is a potentially huge risk if the maintainer walks away.
For some background I recommend you catch the earlier posting.
The conference had previously been held in Hobart back in 2009 and their mascot at the time was Tuz – a Tasmanian devil, wearing a fake beak, pretending to be a penguin. Wikipedia has more details on Tuz and the money raised in his honour that year. For 2017 the team had a local artist, Tania Walker, create an updated graphic featuring Tuz for the conference, shown at left.
I had the pleasure of going to FOSDEM this year and the annual spectacular didn’t cease to deliver. During this year’s conference, my second FOSDEM, I worked with Brian Stinson of CentOS fame to produce the Distributions Devroom.
FOSDEM gets busier every year and the Distributions Devroom was no different. For almost the entire day, the room was filled and we were routinely turning people away for lack of seats. The few times there was a dip in attendance seemed tied to the topic and not the time. This leads us to believe that the program was well balanced and represented the current thoughts and interests around distributions.