The current Omicron spike has forced organizers at All Things Open to make their first-of-the-year Spacewalk event online only and reschedule it for January 25, 2022.
With the Omicron variant of Covid-19 spreading across the country (and globe) like a fast moving storm, the folks at All Things Open have had to rethink their plans for presenting their free Spacewalk event as both an in-person and online hybrid event, and will now be offering the event online only.
This led to some logistical difficulties for the event’s planners, since the original plan had been to livestream the event as it happened from the the Carolina Theater in downtown Durham, North Carolina. Long story short: the event originally scheduled for yesterday will now take place on Tuesday, January 25 at noon Eastern Time. Attendance is absolutely free, but a Zoom registration is required.
“We honestly tried to make it work as a hybrid event (in-person in Durham and streamed online) but COVID/19 and Omicron won again,” Todd Lewis, All Things Open’s chairperson, said in an email announcing the change a few weeks back. “Safety is always a top priority and we felt shifting to online was the right thing to do. We will resume in-person events beginning in Q2 – early April.”
This change comes after the organization successfully presented several in-person events, including its flagship All Things Open conference, in 2021.
Spacewalk, which has become the All Things Open organization’s way of “kicking off” the year, will this year feature David Simmons, a principal developer advocate, at Camunda, the company behind the self-named open-source workflow and decision automation platform. The subject of the day will be the Internet of Things, in a talk called “Automating the IoT with BPMN,” the later acronym standing for “Business Process Management.”
Simmons, who has been working in IoT space for over 15 years (or since before IoT was a known thing in the non-tech world) said this talk will be about how IoT can fullfil its promise of helping businesses make better decisions by utilizing BPMN techniques.
“I’ll walk through an entire proof of concept, from concept to implementation, where I have automated a greenhouse to optimize growing conditions using sensors, actuators, and coordinating all aspects of the greenhouse using Camunda Platform BPMN to integrate business rules with greenhouse best-practices,” he said in an abstract of the talk published by ATO.
In addition to this presentation, the event promises much of the fun of an in-person event, including books and “amazing prizes,” and the announcement of ATO’s 2022 events calendar, which will include special projects the organization has simmering on the burner.
Omicron has also forced ATO’s Open Source 101, an annual one-day event featuring introductory to intermediate level talks on topics such as technology, processes, community, projects and others, to make the change from hybrid to online only. That event is scheduled to take place on Tuesday, March 29 with registration opening on Tuesday, February 8.
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
