The ATO 2025 conference may be in the books, but the organization has more events planned before year’s end—and new events are already on its 2026 dance card.
Anyway you look at it, last week’s All Things Open conference was another success. Numbers wise, the event played to a packed house — which is no small feat at a venue the size of the Raleigh Convention Center.
“More than 3,000 were actually onsite on Monday, October 13 and 2,000+ were onsite on Tuesday, October 14,” Todd Lewis, the event’s founder and chairperson, told FOSS Force in an email exchange. “In total, there were more than 6,500 registrations this year.”
Attendance was also high for the free co-located events that took place on the day before ATO opened its doors.
“We cut off registration for the Community Leadership Summit and GitHub’s Accessibility Summit on Sunday, October 12,” he said. “Both completely filled up. We also hit our cap on the Inclusion and Diversity event the day before it took place. So, in effect all three ‘sold out.’ We had about 1,000 people onsite on Sunday for the co-located events. All three were very successful.”
Even though Lewis and his team have folded the tents on this year’s annual main attraction — All Things Open — the year is nowhere close to being over for the Raleigh, North Carolina-based open source event operator. There are still several free monthly Meetups remaining, including two scheduled for November, to make up for there not being an October Meetup due to last week’s big tent event.
Mixing Open Source with a Dose of AI
Writ large over everything ATO has been doing this year are the initials “AI.” This started in March when ATO teamed with Mark Hinkle, CEO and co-founder of Peripety Labs, to successfully launch All Things Open AI, a two-day event in Durham, Raleigh’s twin city. AI also dominated the schedule at this year’s All Things Open, where by my count 31.4% of the presentations were somehow connected with AI.
In addition, the ATO organization has again partnered with Hinkle, along with Sakib Kadak, founder and CEO of Cognifyd, an AI-focused consulting startup, to organize AI Forward, which will take place on October 27-28 in Charlotte.
“It’s a two-day event we’re really excited about and looking forward to,” Lewis said. “The first day will feature workshops, the second will feature shorter, traditional conference sessions led by some incredible AI thought leaders from all over the U.S.”
That’s not hype. The closing keynote, for example, will be from Igor Jablokov, who’s AI roots include being on the team that developed IBM’s precursor to Watson. He went on to start Yap, which built one of the first cloud‑based speech‑recognition platforms, which was acquired by Amazon in 2011 and became the nucleus for what evolved into Alexa. Today, he continues his work in natural‑language computing as founder and CEO of Raleigh-based Pryon.
Lewis said that the new event’s target audience includes AI practitioners, enterprise/SMB teams, and Charlotte-area community leaders focused on real-world AI application and impact.
“The ATO team will be onsite meeting attendees, with really cool swag to give away,” he added.
Free Monthly Meetups
The combination of open source and AI has also played a prominent role with this year’s monthly Meetups, which are free, single night events. For example, “AI and Linux in 2025” will be the theme of the first of this year’s remaining Meetups. That event will feature Jay LaCroix — also known as Jay the Linux Guy — who’s the creator of Learn Linux TV.
Not all of the Meetups have dealt with the intersection of open source and AI however, including one coming up on November 18 with the topic of “Open Source Post-Quantum Cryptography.”
“The OpenSSL Foundation team will be traveling to Research Triangle Park to co-host the meetup on November 18,” Lewis said. “That doesn’t happen often, so we didn’t want to miss the opportunity. We also haven’t focused on security/ cryptography at a meetup in a while, so the topic should be of significant interest.”
This year has also seen the expansion of “We Love Open Source,” a section of the All Things Open website introduced last year. The project builds on and expands the spirit of OpenSource.com, the site Red Hat maintained for years before ending its support in 2023, after the company’s acquisition by IBM.
ATO’s take features the writings of some of the same people who contributed to the Red Hat project, along with some new voices as well, and also adds professional quality videos that are produced in-house and often shot at ATO events. Jason Hibbets, who ran OpenSource.com for Red Hat for a while, is at the helm.
All Things Open in 2026
Even though the new year is still 2 1/2 months away, there’s already plenty on ATO’s 2026 calendar, starting with at least a dozen of the monthly Meetups. Last year’s inaugural launch of All Things Open AI was a big enough success that it’ll be back for a two day run on March 23 & 24 with a new and improved name: All Things AI. Also, depending on how its upcoming first March 23 & 24 outing looks, Charlotte’s AI Forward might be back for an encore performance as well.
And of course next fall — specifically on October 18-20 — All Things Open and its three co-located events will be back at the Raleigh Convention Center.
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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