How Does Little Ol’ Raleigh Manage to Get at Least 18 Open-Source Events in 2025?

There’s more to All Things Open than the single annual conference. Here’s a look at all of the open-source events that ATO plans to stage in the Raleigh area in 2025.

The Piedmont Triangle, the North Carolina metro area that includes Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill and Research Triangle Park, will have a plethora of top shelf open-source events in the upcoming year. This is thanks partly to the efforts of the All Things Open organization that’s staging the lion’s share of the events, but it’s also because the Triangle has quietly become something of a tech capital while nobody was looking.

I assume that everybody in open source knows that Raleigh is the city where Red Hat, the world’s largest open-source company, is headquartered, but even without Red Hat (and its parent, IBM, which also has a large local presence), Raleigh and the Triangle are the home to so many tech projects that some have called the area “Silicon Valley East.”

If that sounds like hyperbole, it’s not. Just to name a few tech firms with household names that have locations in the area: Cisco, which according to the Department of Commerce has the fourth-largest workforce in Durham county; Lenovo, whose North American headquarters is in Research Triangle Park; and SAS, which employs about 5,200 at its facility in the Raleigh suburb of Cary. There are plenty more.

Asking Built In, the online community for startups and tech companies, for a list of all tech outfits in Raleigh returns 45 pages with about 20 companies to a page, or something like 900 companies in all. Add to that the fact that tech largely runs on open source, and it’s no wonder that All Things Open finds ample opportunities to stage multiple open-source events in the area — in addition to the big tent eponymous conference it stages each October that regularly attracts an in-person attendance of more than 4,000.

For the upcoming year, ATO has 18 open-source themed events scheduled — making the outfit something like the Ringling Brothers Barnum and Baily of open-source events.

All Things Open AI: ATO’s Newest Event

All new this year is All Things Open AI, an event that has the potential to become another big tent event similar to All Things Open’s signature conference. Artificial intelligence is, of course the current big thing, even bigger in terms of money being spent that Kubernetes and containers were previously, and the cloud before that.

“AI is a priority given how fast it’s evolving and its potential impact, so a stand-alone event was warranted in our opinion,” Todd Lewis, the ATO organization’s head honcho told me in a reply to an email I sent asking about the 2025 lineup.

For this event, Lewis and his team are partnering with Mark Hinkle, who these days is heavily involved in the AI arena, especially in the RDU RTP area. He’s an organizer for the RDU Artificial Intelligence Meetup; the editor of The Artificially Intelligent Enterprise, which is both a newsletter and a podcast; and founder and CEO of Peripety Labs, a consulting firm that focuses on generative AI and emerging technologies.

This one’s scheduled to to take place March 17 and 18 at the Carolina Theater in downtown Durham, which is about 30 minutes from the Raleigh Convention Center where ATO takes place. The schedule’s not set on this one yet — the call for papers opened on November 13 and will close at end-of-day on Friday, December 6.

What we know so far is that the event’s first day will be a workshop day that will include three hands-on workshops: Building RAG Implementations, AI Agents, and Desktop Productivity. The second day will be a more traditional conference day, and will feature sessions spread out across three tracks: AI Builders, AI Engineers, and AI Users.

You can keep up-to-date on ATO AI by checking its listing on our FOSS Force Calendar of Open-Source Events. We’ll post a link to the schedule there as soon as it’s available, and other details as soon as we have them.

Unfortunately, the addition of ATO AI means that for at least this year there will be no Open Source 101, a single-day introductory level conference that ATO has been staging for many years.

“We replaced it with the AI event and priority/resource allocation decisions had to be made,” Lewis explained. “We may bring back OS101 in 2026.”

There’s a Spacewalk and Riot Going On

I’m not sure how long Spacewalk‘s been happening, but the folks at ATO refer to the event as the organization’s way “to kick off each new year.”

“We — the ATO team — talk about what we’ll do for the upcoming 12 months and we host a world class speaker,” event organizers say in a statement. “Networking opportunities with the RTP tech community abound, and food and beverages as well as swag are plentiful.”

That last part, especially the swag, has me raring to go — along with the fact that the event is free.

Last year’s speaker was Jay LaCroix, maybe better known as Jay the Linux Guy from Learn Linux TV, and his talk was called 10 Linux Terminal Tips and Tricks. He took questions from the audience, of course, and also signed copies of his book Mastering Ubuntu Server, 4th edition, with book signings being a regular thing at the event.

“Spacewalk will again be hosted in downtown Raleigh at the IMAX Theater,” Lewis said. “We’ll try to keep the tradition of hosting a book signing also, as we have in past years, and we’ll give away a bunch of cool swag. A speaker has not been confirmed, but will be announced soon. It will be an evening program again – doors will open at ~ 5:00 EST, live programming will begin at 6:30.”

Although the All Things Open website has published some pre-publicity that indicates that Spacewalk will take place on January 25, that’s evidently a tentative date. Lewis said, “The date is TBD at the moment.”

Again, keep an eye on our calendar. We’ll put up the date and speaker information as soon as they’re available.

Developer Day is a free event that will be taking place in April.

This one definitely doesn’t have a date yet, but it’ll happen at some time in April. This one also isn’t 100% an ATO event. Officially, it’s put on by RIoT (or Raleigh Internet of Things), which is a support organization for all projects that fall into the IoT bucket. For this one, ATO is a partner. It hosts its own track at the event, which takes place on NC State University’s campus.

It’s not a surprise that ATO is signing on as a partner for this event. For many years, ATO has hosted a mini after-event conference for RIoT that takes place on the evening of ATO’s first day.

Again, watch our calendar for more information on this event.

All This… and Meetups Too

The All Things Open bunch also puts on a free Meetup each month. These early evening events (typically taking place between 6:30 PM to 8:00 PM EDT) happen at venues all over the Triangle area, so if you live in the area, you’re bound to find a meetup that’s close to you. They’ve also been known to leave the Triangle to do an occasional Meetup in, say, Charlotte — which as North Carolina’s largest city probably needs to see what they’re missing by not being in Raleigh.

Each Meetup offers food and beverages, lots of swag, and a world-class speaker. Oh, and networking opportunities. Never turn down a good networking opportunity.

For a good idea on what to expect in the content department: June’s Meetup featured Christian Posta, Global Field CTO at Solo.io talking about Service Meshes and API Management, so it was great for anyone who’s having to wrangle Istio, or even Linkerd. Other recent Meetups have featured Dalia Abo Sheasha, senior product manager at Microsoft on 10 Lessons from Building AI Powered Apps, and Sachin Solkan, VP of intelligent search at Fidelity, who’s talk was From AI Assistants to Intelligent Agents.

Meetups go up on FOSS Force’s calendar on the same day they’re officially announced.

Inclusion & Diversity and Community Leadership Summit

This starts to bring us close to ATO’s namesake event, the All Things Open conference, which I’m not going to write about here because, being the big tent event that it is, it gets plenty of ink elsewhere, including on this site.

What I will say about it is that for the last many years, All Things Open has taken place on a Monday and a Tuesday, leaving room on the Sunday before the event for the Inclusion & Diversity in Open Source and the Community Leadership Summit, which are both free events.

The Inclusion and Diversity Summit features talks, panel discussions, and attendee Q&As from experts, community and company leaders, and technologists — which is also pretty much who attends the event. If you’re wondering what you can expect from the event, that’s easy: videos of all of the sessions from the 2024 event that just happened are now online here.

The Community Leadership Summit calls itself an “unconference” and it brings together community leaders, organizers and managers, as well as projects and organizations, that are interested in growing and empowering a strong community. Leading minds in community management, relations and online collaboration will discuss, debate and continue to refine the art of building an effective and capable community.

You can find out more about this unconference, as well as take a look at the schedule for the conference that just happened (and look at pics from the 2023 event) on the summit’s webpage.