At 2025’s Southern California Linux Fest there will be at least eight colocated open source focused events in addition to the main attraction.
This March, when the doors open on Scale 22x in Passadena, California, they’ll also be opening on at least eight colocated events that’ll be happening under the same roof at the same time — or at least at adjacent times.
The practice of colocating niche-focused events alongside major Linux and open-source conferences has become the new normal, largely because it’s a great way for smaller groups to expose themselves to a larger audience. It’s also good for the large conferences that host them, not only because it expands the conference’s appeal, but also because it offers a way for older conferences with built-in audiences to do what open source projects do best: build communities.
Ilan Rabinovitch, Scale’s chairperson, told FOSS Force that the advent of colocated events at Scale came about somewhat organically over time, as the conference became an important open source event.
“As we grew, OSS projects and communities asked if we might be willing to host their communities as well,” he explained. “We saw that as win-win. They get a place to host their communities, while these colocated events offer us a way to bring together many other communities with our own, allowing for a cross-pollination of ideas and expertise.”
All Things Open, another large open source conference that includes colocated events, has a different, but similar take.
“We started partnering with and colocating events to stay true to our name — All Things Open,” Todd Lewis, ATO’s founder and chairperson told FOSS Force. “We realized from the start that we didn’t have subject matter expertise in every area of open source and that outside expertise and associated events helped us better serve our community.”
ATO, which is a Johnny-come-lately when compared to Scale, added its first colocated event only three years or so after it first launched. That was an annual IoT ‘Demo Night” that was presented by RIOT, an IoT-focused community group.
“Some form of the RIOT event has been going on for nearly 10 years,” Lewis said. “Larry Steffan, the original RIOT executive director started working with us, and Tom Snyder (the current ED) has continued to do so — and we are incredibly grateful.”
More recently, ATO has added a couple of free-to-attend events that happen on the day before the conference’s opening. An annual Inclusion and Diversity event had its first run in 2018, and another event — a Community Leadership Summit — was launched in 2020.
“In the case of inclusion and diversity, it was an area that wasn’t getting nearly enough attention and deserved a lot more, so we spun up an event ourselves and worked with many thought leaders to make it what it is today,” Lewis said.
Lewis said that the leadership summit had a little rougher inaugural outting. “Unfortunately, it was a virtual event due to COVID, but it was wonderful and the relationship was cemented. We just hosted year number five in 2024.”
Colocated Events at Scale
For Scale 22x, which is slated to take place in March at the Pasadena Convention Center, there are seven colocated events that are listed on the event’s website and which seem to be officially connected with the event. In addition, UbuCon NA @ Scale x22 is on UbuCon’s online list of upcoming events, although no information is available about it yet. Expect it to happen, however. For the past fifteen years or so there’s been a UbuCon (which are volunteer run, regional events centered on Ubuntu) at each and every Scale.
In addition to UbuCon, these are the colocated events that will be available at Scale 22x:
- Kwaai Personal AI Summit: As you might guess, this one’s all about artificial intelligence, but takes it to the personal level. Featured at this event will be pAIOS, the open-source Personal AI Operating System, which ships with a promise “to put users in control of their data, digital identity and knowledge model.”
- Cloud Native Days LA: Last year this event was called KCD LA. “We plan to have workshops, talks, and lightning talks covering everything cloud native,” organizers say. “This will include Kubernetes, Docker, serverless, CI/CD, container security, scaling clouds, operators, Istio, LinkerD, gRPC, Etcd, cgroups, Prometheus, ArgoCD, Kubevirt, WASM, serverless, containerized desktops, and much more.” In other words, if it’s cloud native, it’ll be there.
- Postgres @SCALE: This one is a two day, multi-track event which takes place on March 6-7, 2025, ahead of SCaLE 22x. Organizers say it’ll feature talks designed for a general audience of web developers, sysadmins, DBAs and open-source users.
- DevOpsDay LA 2025: This will be year number 14 for this miniconference which is of, by, and for the Southern California DevOps community. According to the folks that put it on: “As part of the global DevOpsDays series, DevOpsDayLA is more than just an event; it’s a movement that fosters collaboration, innovation, and continuous improvement across development and operations teams.”
- SCALE: The Next Generation: With apologies to Picard, Data, and the gang, TNG is a youth-focused tech event that will happen on Saturday, March 8th from 11 am to 5 pm. The event provides a platform for future FOSS leaders to showcase their ideas, projects, and talents.
- OpenInfra Days North America: This mini-conference is being jointly organized by the OpenInfra communities from the United States, Mexico, and Canada. Sessions will cover open source projects used to build data center infrastructure including OpenStack, Kubernetes, Linux, Kata Containers, StarlingX, Ceph, and many more. “We encourage involvement from open source users, contributors, and companies from these countries for a lively networking and community-building opportunity,” organizers say.
- PlanetNix: We’ll let this group speak for itself: “Attend and hack with fellow Nixers – be you cadet or commodore – and earn valuable skill promotions! Coagulate into workshops and boggle as you learn surprising and new Nix powers! Then take what you have learned back to your home bases and train others to build and ship software consistently across space and time. We hope to see you there. Human snacks and commonly-occurring liquid stimulants will be provided.”
“These events are generally not run by Scale,” Rabinovitch said. “We provide the venue and some of the conference infrastructure, but events like PlanetNix or OpenInfra Days are events run by those communities as user or developer summits.
“If Scale was not around they likely would still occur as their own independent events,” he added. “Luckily, we have an existing venue and conference infrastructure so we’re happy to support them, while also bringing new friends to Scale and new topics that our community can learn about.”
Coming Soon to a Conference Near You?
Should all Linux and open source conferences hold colocated events? According to what we hear from conferences that employ them, those that don’t should at least consider doing so.
“We’ve benefited tremendously from the colocated events, but most importantly, our community has,” ATO’s Lewis said. “With us, it’s all about serving the needs of the community. If we can provide an event where community members can learn about many important topics and meet thought leaders in those spaces and sub-spaces, we’ve done our job.”
“I would most definitely encourage others running open source/Linux conferences and events to consider hosting colocated events,” he added. “It requires a lot of coordination and communication, but if done well, the value attendees can and will derive from the experience is tremendous.”
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
