Scale is taking over Pasadena, SUSECon has moved in on Disney’s domain of Orlando for a week, and ATO AI Has an Official Poster (and is close to being sold out). It looks like it’s going to be a good conference year to us!
Man, there’s a whole boatload of conference activity going on right now.
For example, the big tent show that starts the year — it’s in the Los Angeles-area, where it’s dependably warmer this time of the year than it is most anywhere else — opened Thursday at the Pasadena Convention Center. That would be Scale, otherwise known as the Southern California Linux Expo, where our own Larry Cafiero is on hand filing reports.
If my assertion that “Scale opens the year” thing has you confused, it’s probably because you distinctly remember that we were covering Everything Open, another big event, back in January. That show takes place in Australia however, which is on the other side of the equator where January is as hot as July (and July is as frigid as January), so their take on what constitutes a conference year is pretty much the exact opposite of ours.
Around these parts, meaning North America, for as long as I can remember, except for 2022 (when due to Covid restrictions the conference was held in July after being dark in 2021) the opening conference of the season has been the community conference Scale, with its abundance of co-located events. It’s running full blast right now, but this is its last day until next year.
Scale didn’t start out as a beginning-of-year event, BTW. The first Scale, in 2002, was held on December 2, and 2003’s Scale 2x was held on November 22. The next 12 Scales were all held in January or February. In 2016 the event started to take place in March.
Next Up — SUSECon
Opening Monday in Orlando — another location that’s warmer than your average US place this time of year — is SUSECon, the official annual event for SUSE, the Germany-based open-source tech company that’s behind the SUSE Linux distros — SUSE Linus Enterprise and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server — which just happen to be among the oldest Linux distros on the planet, going back even further than Red Hat.
For the first time ever, this year FOSS Force is a SUSECon Media Sponsor, and also for the first time ever we’ll be covering the event with boots sneakers on the ground (the sneakers are mine; I’ll be the one going wheels-up in the morning). Although this event — which is a movable feast, meaning it happens in a different city every year — officially opens Monday, that’s mainly a registration day, so our coverage will start on Tuesday.
In case you don’t know, there’s a lot more to SUSE than just it’s Linux distros. The company basically offers a full stack that includes SUSE Rancher for top shelf Kubernetes management.
After That — All Things Open AI
If you know me, you know that All Things Open is my favorite major open source conference, so it goes without saying, that I’m plenty excited that I’m going to be on hand for the inaugural run of ATO’s new conference, All Things Open AI.
This one’s being put together as a joint effort between Todd Lewis’s ATO organization and Mark Hinkle, the Artificially Intelligent Enterprise guy, who’s officially on board as co-founder and producer of ATO AI.
Although this has been the biggest year yet for AI, and there are a dozen or so “major” AI conferences being planned, this one’s the most exciting to me because it’s the only one that’s focused entirely on open AI.
Evidently a lot of other people feel like I do too, because people are busily grabbing up tickets. In an email exchange with Todd Lewis the other day, I learned that tickets for this event are selling like hotcakes, so much so that they’re in danger of selling out.
“We’re very close to reaching capacity for both days,” Lewis said. “I expect we’ll have to close off registration soon.”
In fact, reaction to this event has been so strong that’s its likely that we’ll hear that this isn’t going to be a one-off event.
“We don’t feel AI is going anywhere,” Lewis answered when I asked him if ATO AI was going annual, “so the conference will likely become an annual thing. AI will change and evolve, like all new technologies, and the event will track that evolution, educating people along the way. People really need to be educated about it, and we’ll try to help as much as possible.”
They’re also pulling out all the stops with this one. Last week they unveiled the event’s official poster, which is a two sided affair. In a way that’s a shame because anyone who gets one and hangs it will have one side will be hidden by the wall. The solution, of course, is to just get two of them, and display them side-by-side, which should work because that’s the way the ATO folks are showing them off:
Source: ATO
While the ATO organization’s flagship conference, All Things Open, takes place in Raleigh, North Carolina, the AI event is taking place about thirty miles down the road, at the historic Carolina Theater in downtown Durham, Raleigh’s twin city. It’s going to be a two-day event, with the first day being devoted to in-depth workshops, and the second day being a traditional conference day, with keynotes, presentations, and the like.
As of right now, tickets are still available here, and you can check out the schedule here.
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
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