Nerdearla: Homegrown Open Source Conferencing Latin American Style

An open source conference based in Argentina has lately been branching out to include events in Chile and Mexico, with Madrid, Spain in the works for 2025.

There’s a whole slew of great and sometimes huge open source conferences around the globe that are mostly unknown to us English speakers because they’re in another language. One example would be Nerdearla, which has taken place annually in Buenos Aires since 2014. Practically unknown here in the States, it’s a big, big thing in Spanish speaking Latin America.

In fact, it’s gotten so big that it’s started to expand into other areas. Last year, Nerdearla held an event in Santiago, Chile that was so successful that it’s going to be an annual event going forward. Starting today, there’s Nerdearla Mexico, in Mexico City, which is livestreaming now, and which will open its doors to in-person attendees on Friday.

“The conference started in Buenos Aires and ran as an in-person only event until 2019,” founder Ariel Jolo told me in a recent interview. “In 2020 and 2021, because of the pandemic, we switched to virtual formats and that increased our audience in Latin America and other Spanish-speaking countries. In 2022 we returned to the Buenos Aires in-person event, then in 2023 we did Buenos Aires and Santiago, Chile. This year we already did Santiago, Chile again, in April.”

He said that attendance at this year’s conference in Santiago doubled that of of its first outing in 2023. Also this year’s main event in Buenos Aires had the largest attendance ever, with 12,000 people walking through the gate to attend in person, and another 30,000 catching the show as it livestreamed.

“We did our biggest conference yet in September, in Buenos Aires, and now we are doing the first edition in Mexico,” he said.

Nerdearla’s Origin Story

Like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak building computers in the Jobs’ family garage, or Mark Zuckerberg launching Facebook from a college dorm room, every good tech project (like every good comic book superhero) has an origin story. In Nerdearla’s case, that story revolves around Sysarmy (usually rendered all lower case), a users’ group for sysadmins that Jolo started in 2012.

“I was a lonely sysadmin and I needed some support from the community,” he said. “At that time in Argentina there weren’t many communities left. We had Linux user groups back in the early two-thousands, but for different reasons, mostly political I guess, they faded away and I needed a support group. I also wanted to give support.”

So he created Sysarmy, a users’ community for tech workers that still exists today, and which is the organization behind the Nerdearla conferences. Like any good open source community, Sysarmy takes an agnostic approach.

“It didn’t really matter if you use Ubuntu, CentOS, or whatever, if you were from system administration, networking, programming, you were welcome,” he said. “This is a support group and our motto is ‘support for those who give support,’ so we are basically a shoulder to cry on, or somebody that you can text and say, ‘Hey, I’m having this issue. I don’t know how to deal with it. Please help me.'”

Two years after starting Sysarmy, Jolo launched the conference, which was called Nerdearla as a play on the word “nerd”. He said that just as Sysarmy was created to fill a need, so was Nerdearla.

“At the time I was the only sysadmin in a three to four hundred people company, and I was the only one dealing with everything,” Jolo explained “At Sysarmy we met every other week on a Wednesday night and had beers. I would bring my laptop and buy a beer for somebody that would help me.”

The trouble with that approach, he said, was that 10 o’clock in the evening after imbibing a few beers wasn’t a good time to submit changes to production. So Nerdearla was born as a way of creating that same environment, but in the daytime with the beers coming after.

“The conference was originally born as a coworking conference, and of course we had talks, sessions, workshops, and everything,” he said. “That started 10 years ago, in 2014, and there were like 60 people in the room, and I knew 58 of them.”

When I mentioned that at the first All Things Open conference in Raleigh, only something like a thousand people attended he said, “A thousand people took me three years to get.”

Then as now, most of the attendees at that first event were locals, he said. “We did get a fly-in from another province in Argentina,” he said, “and that was the highlight of the first event, to have somebody that actually paid for a plane ticket to come to the one day event, which I think started at 10 and ended up at 6, and then we went to have Beers.”

These days, the Buenos Aires event is spread over five days. “Two days that are virtual first, and then three days in person,” Jolo said.

Nerdearla Mexico

Today’s launch of Nerdearla Mexico will offer an event that’s slightly shorter than the main event in Buenos Aires, although that’s likely to change if it goes on to become an annual event.

“It’s to be a three day event,” Jolo said. “This Thursday is a virtual event. Friday and Saturday are in person.”

Actually, Thursday is not the only day that will be livestreamed, it’s just the day that will only be offered virtually with no in-person component. As with all Nerdearla events, the entire show will be available online, live as it happens.

“The three days can be watched via livestreaming,” he said. “If you are not in Mexico, you can still watch the three days of the conference.”

Also like Nerdearla in other cities, the event doesn’t cost anything to attend.

“The conference is 100% free since we started 10 years ago,” he said. “All editions, all countries, all everything, virtual and in person. It’s all 100% free. The sponsors make it possible for us to run a free conference.”

Although the focus of Nerdearla is to feature talks that are given in Spanish, for various reasons some of the talks are presented in English and translated into Spanish for the benefit of attendees who aren’t fluent in English. Other talks that are given in Spanish are listed on the schedule in English as concessions to speaker requests.

“Some speakers prefer to have their title of their talks in English because it’s catchier, because… I don’t know,” Jolo said. “Ninety percent of the talks are going to be in Spanish, but we do have some international guest speakers. The ones that are held virtually, we add subtitles in Spanish. The ones that are going to be held live, we have a captioner, a live translation for the audience.

“We run a survey every year, and between 65% and 75% of our audience speaks English or can understand English content, but still we want to be 100% there for all of our audience,” he added.

Presentations that will be given in English in Mexico City include:

• Dan’l Lewin, co-founder with Steve Jobs of NeXT and currently president and CEO of the California-based Computer History Museum, will give a talk called Kids Can’t Wait! that will take place on Thursday at 2 PM Eastern Time.
• Sara Hooker, Research VP at Cohere for AI, whose talk, What Does Scale Give Us: Why We Are Building a Ladder to the Moon will take place on Friday at 6:30 PM Eastern Time.
• Matt Mullenweg in a “Fireside Chat” interview format presentation on Saturday at 11:30 AM Eastern Time.

All Neadearla presentations can be watched live with registration required, or later on Neardearla’s YouTube channel.

“We hope to have a great turnout here in Mexico so that next year we will be able to do the same,” Jolo said. “The thing we have already announced and already have on schedule for 2025 is Nerdearla Madrid. For the first time we’re going to Europe and we’re going to have a conference in November 2025 in Madrid.”