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.