Last week I told you about a few of the more than 130 speakers scheduled for this year’s All Things Open (ATO) conference in Raleigh, to be held October 19-20. Today, we’ll talk about the impressive lineup of keynote speakers who’re on tap this year.
Actually, it’s something of a miracle that the event is still good-to-go. IT-oLogy, the organization behind ATO, is headquartered in Columbia, S.C., which was subject to massive flooding last week in the wake of hurricane Joaquin. In fact, the organizations headquarters are located only blocks away from the Congaree River, the source of much flooding.
Thankfully, the organization’s infrastructure came through just fine, according to Todd Lewis, who is both the chair person for ATO and IT-oLogy’s Executive Director-Columbia.
“We were evacuated but thankfully were spared,” he told FOSS Force by email on Wednesday. “We just got back in yesterday.
“The flooding here has been incredible and unfortunately more homes are under water than I can believe,” he said. “We’re truly thankful to be alive and still have a place to call home. Amazing how you can take things for granted until something like this happens. Brings you back to what’s important in a hurry.”
The folks with IT-oLogy were indeed lucky. In all, at least fourteen people died statewide in the flooding, and countless homeowners whose homes spent time underwater will be needing financial support. Pray, chant a mantra, donate money…whatever you can do to help. Money might be most helpful.
And in Raliegh, which didn’t catch as much of the storm and remained high and dry, the show will still go on…
The opening keynote address on Monday morning, just after the welcome by Mayor Nancy McFarlane, will be the CEO of Red Hat, Jim Whitehurst. Expect him to be smiling. We learned just last week that the company is on track to reach $2 billion in revenues this year. No matter how you feel about Red Hat, that’s good news for the open source community, and working proof — if you need it — that the open source model is financially viable.
Following Whitehurst will be Mark Skarpness, the director of embedded software at Intel’s Open Source Technology Center and Brandon Philips, CTO for CoreOS.
During lunch on Monday the award-winning documentary “Code: Debugging the Gender Gap” will be screened in the Raleigh Convention Center’s fourth floor Grand Ballroom, courtesy of Red Hat. Afterward, there will be a panel discussion — “Cultivating Diversity and Inclusion in Projects, Communities and Companies” — that will be moderated by Red Hat’s DeLisa Alexander. Joining her onstage will be Caroline Simard with the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University, Nithya Ruff with the SanDisk Open Source Strategy Office, and John William Templeton with Venturata Economic Development Corporation.
Tuesday morning’s keynotes start with Mark Russinovich, CTO of…well, Microsoft Azure. After that, it’ll be Isabel Jiminez, a distributed systems engineer with Mesosphere; Jono Bacon, who’s the senior director of community with the X Prize Foundation; and Joshua McKenty, the Field CTO with Cloud Foundry.
During lunch hour on Tuesday, starting at 12:15, there will be an hour’s worth of Lightening Talks, which will be hosted by Jason Hibbets and the folks at Opensource.com. Here, speakers will have five minutes each “to enlighten attendees with a burst of information about an open source topic they are passionate about.” These were very popular at the two previous ATOs, and are sure to be a big hit again this year.
For those who want to attend this year’s event but haven’t yet purchased tickets, it’s too late to get in on the relatively inexpensive “early bird” prices. However, registration is still open.
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Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
