TL;DR; Get your tickets from here!
For the fourth year running, foss-north is taking place. Now bigger than ever.
It all started as a one day conference in a room with too much people in it. We gathered ten speakers and started something that continues to this day.
Back then we, the three organizers: Jeremiah, Mikael and myself, joked over beers that we should have trainings, conference, community rooms and much more. A moderated FOSDEM was a crude description of what we wanted to build. But this was only us dreaming away.
During the past years we’ve tried different venues. We’ve gone from one day, one track to two days and two tracks. This year we decided to go for it all: four days, trainings, a community day and the conference.
Organizing a conference is to manage a chicken and egg type problem. You need speakers to get sponsors, and you need sponsors to get speakers to the venue. The same applies to the audience – visistors wants speakers, speakers wants visitors. This is why it takes time to establish a conference.
Last year we felt that we reached a tipping point – the call for papers was so full that we had to extend the conference with an additional day. We simply could not pick the right contents for a single day. This means that we feel that the conference part is established. If you want to speak, the call for papers is still open.
That takes us to the next steps. The community day consists of various projects and groups organizing workshops, hackathons, install fests, development sprints and whatnot throughout the city. We find venues (usually conference rooms) and projects and hope that people will come visit the various events. Again, starting from zero projects, zero venues and no real idea how many visitors to expect, we are trying to put this together. At the time of writing, it looks great. We have 7 projects and 5 venues fixed, but we are still looking for both projects and venues. If you want to join in, look at our call for projects.
The same logic applies to the training. Now we have training contents, all we need are visitors. The great thing is that our teachers, Michael Kerrisk and Chris Simmonds, are great to work with and understand our situation. Now we just have to work hard to make sure that we find students for them.
The final piece of the puzzle, which is not always visible to speakers and visitors, is the hunt for sponsors. Venues does not come for free, and we believe in compensating our speakers for their costs, thus we need sponsors. We offer the opportunity to host a booth during the conference days and the chance to meet our audience. We also believe that helping a conference focused on free and open source, is a way to contribute to the free and open source movement. For this we have a network of sponsors that we’ve worked with in the past (thank you all!) but as the conference grows, we need more help. If you want to join in, have a look at our call for sponsors
I’ve written a lot about speakers, sponsors and projects. Now all we need are visitors – lots and lots of visitors. So bring your friends to Gothenburg and join us at foss-north. The early bird tickets are available now. Get yours here!
