Swedish FOSS Bonanza

Me and some friends are creating a conference, called FOSS-NORTH, and the experience has been eye-opening.

Firstly, the folks I’m working with have a lot of experience, some of them are educators and others have literally written the book on key FOSS software frameworks, they all have advanced degrees and years of experience with Free Software. We set out with pretty modest goals, we want a conference in the town where we live and work that is focused on software development and technology related to Free Software and open source. Open hardware and open data were planned to be also fun topics we’d love to see but we are not picky and we mostly want a cool place for like-minded folks to get together, have fun, and talk about what we’re interested in. We never expected the quality of submissions.

Secondly, I apologize if this sounds like I’m “humble bragging” but I think we’ve all been a little humbled by the quality of the submissions we received. We all expected we’d be begging people to submit their talks and indeed we started out by recruiting our good friend Daniel Stenberg of curl fame to come and speak. He said yes, thankfully, and when we opened the Call for Papers we were greeted by a minor avalanche of quality content that could extend our conference by a full day.

We’re not really designed to be a two-day conference for this year, we really want a solid one-day event that establishes the conference as a permanent part of the FOSS landscape in Scandinavia. This is no small feat given the Open Source days in Denmark and other conferences in Finland and Norway but that’s our goal. We’re talking with the folks from FSCONS to see how we can collaborate and we’re hopeful we can collaborate well with them.

I’m really thrilled and a bit amazed at what the conference might become and am very grateful to all who’ve helped with it so far, not least all those submissions to the conference — thank you!

Hope to see you there!