Category: foss-north

foss-north – or doing many things at once

When placing this year’s foss-north event over a quarter break I knew that I would be busy both at work and at the conference. Little did I know what was beyond the horizon ;-)

As a consequence of the COVID-19 situation, the event has to be converted from a physical meeting to a virtual event. This means many things to an organizer: renegotiating all sponsorship contracts, renegotiating with the physical venue, setting up the infrastructure for a virtual event, rescheduling all speakers, and so on.

We at foss-north are lucky. All sponsors continue to stay with us and the venue was very cooperative when it came to rescheduling the event.

I have started to document our virtual conference setup so that other conferences in the same situation can learn. Pull requests are welcome!

This Sunday we decided to stress test the infrastructure by running the lightning talks. This is a good test case, as it involves a maximum number of speaker transitions, as well as more frequent QA sessions. From an organizer perspective, this is really like running a full day of the conference in 90 minutes.

I’m happy to tell you that the talks went well! You find them below. Following the links you find slides as well as recordings of the sessions.

Develop better software with usability testing by Andreas Nilsson
Running Android on the Raspberry Pi by Chris Simmonds
The Yocto Project 10 minute quick-start guide by Ron Munitz
Getting started with your smart, connected, vehicle project by Dimitris Platis
Seven years in Tibet^W^Wat Home by Kristoffer Grönlund
Linux on RISC-V by Drew Fustini
Singularity container platform by Anders Björklund

We’ve also been able to get most of the conference schedule in place and just have a few rough edges to fix before the big event. I am extremely pleased with how this has turned out. We still have a stellar speaker setup and I hope that you will all join in and watch the streams. The event is free for all and open to all and runs from March 29 – April 1.

foss-north

It is with great regret that I have to announce that foss-north 2020 has been postponed due to the COVID-19 situation.

It will be replaced by a virtual event during the planned dates (March 30-31), and a physical event during the fall.

We regret any inconvenience that this causes our guests and sponsors. At the same time we appreciate the great support of our sponsors who unanimously support us in these difficult times.

Details will be shared at https://foss-north.se/2020/ as we learn more.

This is turning out to be a really shitty week. But we will prevail together.

I’m always positively surprised about the amount of support and love out there in difficult times. It is what makes the world go around.

foss-north 2020 Training Day

Let’s talk about the foss-north 2020 training day! Every year we invite interesting speakers for the conference. Some of them are also teachers, and some of them are willing to hold a heavily discounted open enrollment training the day after the conference.

This year we offer three trainings:

You can get a training as an add-on to your ticket. You can even upgrade your ticket and add a training afterwards. Check it out here: https://foss-north.se/2020/tickets.html.

This gives you four days of contents: Community – 2x Conference – Training. And you get to visit Gothenburg!

foss-north 2020 Community Day

Let me tell you about the foss-north 2020 community day. It has been an idea for many years, but it all started last year. The idea is that we welcome open source projects to a day of hacking, workshoping, teaching and fun the day before the conference.

This year we are visited by Ansible, Debian, FreeBSD, Gnome, KDE and RISC-V. We a functional programming group meeting and a badge hacking workshop.

The community day is free of charge. It works thanks to the volunteers from the projects, and all the companies helping us with venues.

You are of course very welcome to join the conference days too. For them you will need a ticket. You can learn more here: https://foss-north.se/2020.

More foss stuff

It is busy days at the moment – but in a positive way.

First of all – a huge thanks to everyone who submitted to the Call for Papers for foss-north 2020. We have over 70 hours (!!!) of contents to squeeze into two tracks over two days. As always, it will be hard to pick the speakers to create the very best program.

Other foss-north activities includes starting to populate the community day activities, as well as getting a whole bunch on sponsors onboard. An extra big thanks to Luxoft and Red Hat Ansible for helping us by picking up the Gold Sponsorship packages. Ansible are even running their European Contributor Summit as a part of the foss-north Community Day together with events by KDE, Gnome, FreeBSD, Debian, and a hardware hacking workshop. I’m really looking forward to this – if you want to join in with your own project, workshop, hackaton, etc – just ping me!

The other big foss-north change for this year is that we are finally abandoning Eventbrite for a self-hosted system. Big thanks to Magnus Hagander helping us getting the pgeu-system up and running. At the moment, we offer login via Github and Google OAUTH. We’re looking into setting up a self-hosted OAUTH service as well, to let you log in locally, but that will not happen for the 2020 event due to time reasons.

Closer in time is the next local foss-gbg meetup. We are running an event around React together with our good friends at Edument. We already have 50+ registered attendees, so it will be fun!

In other news – I’ve also released Ordmonster – if anyone has kids who wants to get started reading. This is a complement to the Mattemonster app for basic maths launched earlier. Both are made with Godot, a tool that I enjoy more and more.

fosdem, day #0

I arrived in Brussels yesterday, and today feels like the day before the storm. Closing some work from the hotel room, meeting some people before the fosdem chaos, doing some preparatory stuff for foss-north.

Make sure to checkout the foss-north Community Day page. It is mostly scaffolding yet, but it will grow quite quickly. Also, if you bump in to me, grab a foss-north flyer and help spread the word!

Preparing foss-north 2020

Next year’s foss-north will take place March 29 – 31, with the training day on April 1. Preparations are under way, and now we need your participation to make this event as great as the past years.

The preparations are under way and we’ve opened the Call for Papers. We truly believe that we bring together the best audience with the best speakers. Being a part of this is a great experience, so make sure to get your talk proposal submitted.

Another part of the foss-north experience is the community day. The day before the actual conference, a large set of community groups arrange workshops, hackatons, dev sprints, even mini conferences. This year we’ve already confirmed the participation of KDE, FreeBSD, and “something embedded” arranged by Endian (last year they did a full day workshop on the Zephyr Project).

If you want to be a part of the community day – don’t hesitate to reach out to info@foss-north.se. We help with a venue, food, and promotion. All you need to have is a cause!

In addition to this we are, of course, on the look out for sponsors. If you want to support us, or even take part in the conference with a booth, please join our Call for Sponsors. Make sure to tell your employer that they should sponsor – all sponsor packages include free tickets, so that way you can both participate in the event, and help us making this possible.

Between all of this we’re also working on the infrastructure. I’d like to extend a big thanks to Magnus Hagander from Postgresql. He is helping the migration to their pgeu-system system. This will give us a single system integrating the features we need – tickets, sponsors, scheduling, accounting. So no more Google Forms, Eventbrite, and manual coordination of systems. If you like css, html, and such, you’re more than welcome to help. Some pages still has rough edges.

Long story short: join us at foss-north 2020 – it will be fun! Take the opportunity to see Gothenburg end of March in 2020.

foss-north 2020 is on

The foss-north event due a few days ago got cancelled due to health issues, but I’m happy to announce that I’m back and that the planning for foss-north 2020 already is on.

The event will be run as last year, meaning one community day, two conference days and one training day. The community day will be on March 29, conference march 30-31 and training on April 1.

Last year we attracted some 100+ people for the community day and 250+ people during the conference (260 tickets sold). My personal goal for 2020 is 400 visitors (we can do it!) and 200 people during the community day. Also, let’s find a bigger place for the social event ;-)

I just sent out the first sponsorship request to our old sponsors and am happy to see that we already have one sponsor lined up. I have a feeling that this will be a great year.