More than 40 speakers from various open source fields will be giving presentations online on March 29th at Open Source 101, a single-day open source conference hosted by All Things Open.
If there’s one thing that Todd Lewis and the crew at All Things Open do better than present online open source events, it’s staging events that are live and in-person. With the latest omicron surge appearing to be rapidly receding, ATO was able to announce on Tuesday that live open source events will be returning to Raleigh — a city I like to call Silicon Valley East — on April 19.
But first there’s a big one-day event coming up on Tuesday March 29 to rock your at-home world.
Open Source 101
The fact that this year’s Open Source 101 will be online only was a big disappointment to the ATO folks, who had been certain they’d be opening the doors to live audiences again this year, especially after having successfully staged their namesake and much larger flagship event, October’s All Things Open, as a hybrid event (meaning in-person and livestreamed online), followed by a hybrid version of Containers 101 in December.
With the rise of omicron, however, organizers regrouped and for safety’s sake decided that through the first quarter of 2022 all events would again be online only.
In spite of this setback, Lewis told FOSS Force that they’ve pulled out all of the stops to make this the best Open Source 101 ever, with not only a top-shelf lineup of speakers and presentations, but with some extremely high dollar prizes for a free event (added to the prizes since we first told you about the event in February is an Apple MacBook Pro with the M1 Chip and 8-Core CPU, 8-Core GPU, and 256GB SSD Storage).
The full schedule has also been made available since our February article, and it’s pretty impressive.
Who’s It For and Who’s Going to be Speaking?
Unlike All Things Open and most other open source conferences, which are designed primarily for experienced open source technologists, Open Source 101 is for beginers and intermediate level practitioners. Intended as an educational and networking on-ramp for anyone who wants to learn about open source and computer tech, it’s designed for students and early-career technologists, as well as established technologists working in or coming over from proprietary environments.
This doesn’t mean the event isn’t willing to take on some subjects that are on the cutting edge of open source technology. For example, the Emerging Technologies track will feature two talks on VR, AR, VR, and all of the other aspects associated with the current catchphrase “metaverse.”
This will start with a talk, “Anyone Can Build the Metaverse — So Let’s Build It Together,” from Liv Erickson, team lead for Mozilla’s Hubs project and previously a senior product manager at AWS where she helped launch the Open 3D Engine. Oh, she’s also been an engineering manager at the virtual reality startup High Fidelity, so she comes to the table with plenty of metaverse cred.
(On Monday, FOSS Force will publish an article that centers around a talk we had with Erickson a couple of weeks back.)
Immediately after that, Jakob Bornecrantz, an XR Architect at Collabora and a member of the OpenXR working group, will explore Monado and Khronos’ OpenXR standard, give an overview about the current state of open source virtual reality, and look at what lies ahead in a presentation called, “FOSS Virtual & Augmented Reality.”
In total, Open Source 101 will feature eight tracks and 40 presentations, in addition to seven keynote addresses — not bad for a “small” single day event. In addition to Emerging Technologies, the tracks include two Technologies tracks and three under the heading Processes, as well as Case Study/Demo and Projects.
Looking for recommendations?
I’ll be watching the two “metaverse” presentations, but I’m also looking forward to watching two talks in the Technologies track: “Containers in Depth — Understanding How Containers Work to Better Work With Containers” from Brent Laster, an R&D DevOps director at SAS among other things, and “DevOps, 12-Factor, and Open Source” by Justin Reock, a Field CTO and Chief Evangelist at Gradle Enterprise.
In addition, I have my eye on “Open Source Software Licenses and Business Models Explained” from Peter Zaitsev, CEO and co-founder of Percona; and “Preventing Supply Chain Attacks on Open Source Software,” a joint effort by two folks from CapitalOne, Kavitha Venkataswamy, director of product security, and Srinivasan Rangaraj, a senior information security product consultant.
Those just entering the realm of IT technology and open source might want to take a look at “An Introduction to Kubernetes and Continuous Delivery Fundamentals” from Brad Topol, an IBM Distinguished Engineer; and “Intellectual Property and Open Source 101” with Jim Jagielski, the head of the Open Source Program Office at Salesforce and a co-founder of the Apache Software Foundation.
Coders working on a new project might benefit from “Should My Open Source Project be a Nonprofit?” with Jack Aboutboul, community manager at the AlmaLinux Foundation.
Remember, if there’s two presentations you want to see that’ll be livestreaming at the same time, there’s no need to fret. Open Source 101 will be making videos of all presentations available for on-demand viewing.
Open Source 101 is completely free to attend, but does require registration.
Life After Open Source 101
As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, All Things Open announced on Tuesday that its upcoming April Meetup, which are evening events tailored for the Raliegh metro area, will be live — which will make it the first live event from ATO since Containers 101.
The upcoming Meetup is still a work in progress, so other than the fact that it’ll be held on April 19 from 6:30 pm to 8:00 pm EDT at the Raleigh Convention Center, not much else is known.
“Final details are still being worked out and will be added here very soon, but go ahead and add us to your calendar,” ATO said on its Meetup web page. “In the meantime, know the session will feature a world-class speaker(s) and topic(s), and the networking will be excellent. We can’t wait to see our community again mask-free!”
FOSS Force will let you know more about this as soon as we know.
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
