Category: foss-north

The next foss-north

This year’s foss-north was the tenth incarnation. I’ve been organizing foss-gbg since 2013, and foss-north since 2016 (two events in 2020 makes it ten in total). It’s been quite a journey – moving between three venues, working with amazing speakers and sponsors, finding a way through the pandemic, while getting to know so many people.

The conference continued when fscons moved from town. Henrik, who helped start fscons has been invaluable during the foss-north years.

Over the years, there has been multiple people helping out with things like announcing speakers, manning the registration booth, finding speakers and creating a program. One of the people who has been around the whole time is Tobias, who is ran a large portion of the show this year and is taking over the lead organizer role.

Private life has been rough over the past two years, so the decision to step back from foss-north has been more or less inevitable. So it’s a great feeling to be able to sit down and enjoy the show and know that the event is in good hands with Tobias.

Thank you all for speaking, visiting, helping out at, and sponsoring foss-north. See you at next year’s event. I’ll have more time to mingle than ever before! ;-)

First Week of Work and School

As the first week of work and school comes to an end, I realized that this 100 days to offload is harder than predicted. I partly blame that I got the traditional going-back-to-work cold, but I guess I also have less time to spend on fun stuff like writing.

This week has been about cleaning up.

I’ve started to clean-up my backlog of foss-north video recordings. I’ve got some 12GB of videos rendered, and I’m not even halfway. For next year we really need to do something about the audio recording situation, but it is what it is and it will have to do.

I’ve also contacted a lawyer to help me clean up some personal stuff that I need to complete, given my new family situation. It is not hard, I just find myself procrastinating instead of doing the paperwork. By paying someone (a lot) I guess I will be more focused at completing the task.

Finally, I’m cleaning out stuff from my office and garage. The office simply needed cleaning. If I intend to keep a collection of keyboards, I probably need to make sure they fit somewhere. But it is getting there. I need to reorder the stuff in my shelves to make for a nicer video call background though :-)

I’m cleaning the garage to make room for the electrician who will come and install a charging box for my new, all electric, car. More about this in another post – but it will be nice to be able to do three phase charging at home instead of just 2kW.

All in all – a productive week!

A summer of catching up

The feeling of this summer is one of catching up. Last summer was intense due to changes in the family followed by decease and death, leaving with me as a full time single parent. To my great joy, I’ve met someone who is special to me, so this summer has been about getting our families to work as one. It has been fun, but also very intense.

This means that my focus on engagements that I used to do has been very focused on deadlines and what must be done, rather than what I take pleasure in doing. That means economic reporting for foss-north and such. I pushed hard to make foss-north possible this year, and am very happy that it did. However, I’m still catching up in the post event activities.

This means editing videos and such now, rather than in May, and trying to get them on-line during the fall. All speakers have been very understanding in this, so I’m sure it will be good eventually.

This also means that I’ve actively taken a step back from gbgcpp (and swedencpp), as well as not attending fosdem, nor any Stockholm meetups (tdbi, swedencpp, etc). It also means that there has been no gbgcpp activity for a very long time. Let’s see how (if?) I can reactivate that community at some point in time. Don’t hesitate to reach out to me if you want to help.

This post is a part of my 100 days to offload effort.

foss-north – two weeks left

It is under two weeks left until foss-north, so make sure that you have your tickets at hand.

The event takes place from Sunday April 23, with a Community Day. We have a couple of workshops lined up and a social event, but there is still room for more if you want to arrange something.

Then follows two days of conference on April 24-25 where we have a whole range of awesome speakers lined up. The conference is recorded, but not live streamed. As you know – it is only live once – so make sure to secure your tickets.

First face-to-face conference since COVID, so I’m psyched and nervous. Let’s make this a great one!

foss-north – Just one month left

As I blogged about earlier, life has been challenging the past months, but now things are getting back to normal. This means that some things are late, but also that I really want to do some things. foss-north is among these things.

In one month, April 23-25, foss-north 2023 will take place at Chalmers Conference Centre, in Gothenburg, Sweden. This will be the first in-person event since 2019 and I know it will be great. The speaker line-up has been set and it will be great. We’ve got a bunch of great sponsors helping out to make this possible. What we need are projects for the community day and visitors – this is where you come in to the picture!

So, to encourage you to get yourself a ticket. Tell your friends. And if you want to do a hackaton, workshop or just hang out with fellow hackers, reach out to me to get your project to join the community day!

Getting back to speed

The end of 2022 and beginning of 2023 has not been much to cheer about, but life goes on and it is time to do some fun stuff, and I’ve got some lined up that just might involve you.

First of all, foss-north is back as a physical event. The 2023 event will be the 8th (9th if you consider that we had two events back in 2020 in hope of COVID to be over after the summer) and it will be the 5th physical event. Last time around, in 2019, we peaked the number of speakers, community projects and visitors, so I hope that we can continue that trend and make it even bigger this year.

If you want to participate as a speaker the Call for Paper is still open for another week, so feel free to join in. We’re also looking for projects for the community day as well as sponsors and visitors. Tickets will be made available during March.

In addition to this, me and a couple of friends are getting back to podcasting. The topic is anything open source and we’ve setup a github project for you to contribute your ideas. Feel free to drop in your suggestions.

fosdem 2022

Yet another virtual fosdem. The organizer team does an amazing job putting it together, but fosdem without the hallway track will never be the same.

Nevertheless, I gave two talks in the Conference Organisation devroom. One on the topic of of the video flow that is used at foss-north, using OBS, Jitsi and Kdenlive. The other talk was about using pgeu-system to run a conference. Here, I was joined by the project author, Magnus Hagander, during the Q&A.

All in all, good fun. But I’m already looking forward to 2023 and a physical event in Brussels. Take care and I’ll see you there!

foss-north 2021 – Speakers and Call for Papers

TL;DR; Call for Papers closes on Sunday. Join foss-north 2021 and be a part of a great speaker line-up!

When planning foss-north, we always pre-announce some speakers early on. This helps set the tone of the conference, show sponsors that we have contents, and – interestingly – also increase the number of submissions to our call for papers.

This year is a bit special due to COVID-19 and the conference will be our third virtual installment, but we are still hoping to bring together great people and contents.

This year we have four pre-announced speakers who I’m very excited about. We have everything from stories from how the Internet is kept safe, how to use open source methods in your organization, how industry verticals collaborate around open source, all the way to how to write a Linux kernel driver.

So, in no particular order, I give you…

… Anne-Marie Eklund Löwinder who will talk about signing the Internet root zone.

This will be the story from when Anne-Marie worked as Crypto Officer and attended the cermonies around DNSSEC. How do we protect the secrets that are used to protect the Internet itself.

… Isabel Drost-Fromm who will talk about how to use the open source way beyond open source. By applying inner source principles, the magic that makes open source work can be used inside an organization too.

These are aspects such as sense of ownership, independence, and so on. If developers are willing to work for fun on open source, how do we create the same joy at work.

… Leslie Hawthorn who will talk about strategic open source engagements for vertical markets. This is about how to work openly within an industry vertical and not a single component or project.

This is interesting from a foss-north perspective, as this is a conference about everything and nothing. I guess that makes it a horizontal event. How can vertical organizations meet to identify shared cross-cutting aspects.

… Marta Rybczynska will give a talk appropriately titled Into the Jungle, about writing Linux kernel drivers.

In this talk we will look at writing a Linux network driver from scratch, diving into the deep end and learning how to swim.

The Call for Paper is still open until Sunday, so if you have a topic that you want to discuss, make sure to get your contribution in!