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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Just a friendly reminder that the Call for Papers for foss-north 2020 is closing tonight. Make sure to get your talk submission in!
Also – if your project wants to join the community day – let us know at info -at- foss-north.se. We set up a venue and promote – you bring the contents!
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!
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.
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.
For the past three weeks (from August 11, to be exact) I have had a fever that I couldn’t really shake. At the same time my wife had pneumonia for which she was successfully treated. Antibiotics is treated with care in Sweden, so I basically waited for my CRP tests to return a high enough value for my doctor to be convinced that I had an infection.
On Friday 24th I got my first round of antibiotics. They did not help, so on the morning of the 27th I returned and got another, stronger, antibiotics. I was also told to go directly to ER if I got any worse. I did. On Thursday morning I landed in ER.
It turns out it was not pneumonia at all, but blood clots throughout my lungs – way too close to a proper game over for comfort. It took me four days to stop degrading, and six days before I could leave the hospital. Right now I’m on ordered rest for at least two weeks. Something I apparently need, as I’m super tired as soon as I do the smallest thing. Right now my exercise consists of walking around the block, ~400m, twice a day.
Hence, there is no way I can arrange the foss-north event planned in the end of October. I’d like to thank all the sponsors who signed up, and those which whom I postponed the meetings. I would also like to thank everyone who submitted talks – the line-up would have been amazing. Finally, I’d like to thank the friendly people who helped cancel everything – it really took a heavy load of my chest.
This is a hugely frustrating situation to me as an individual – I want to work and I want to run, but I guess it is time to slow down for a while and then come back stronger. There will be another foss-north, and I will run 10km trail under the hour. Just not this year.
We’ve already confirmed three awesome speakers and will fill the day with more contents in the weeks following the closing of the CfP, so make sure to get your submission in.
Patricia Aas
The first confirmed speaker is Patricia Aas who will speak about election security – how to ensure transparency and reliability into the election system so that it can be trusted by all – including a less technologically versed public.
Also, this is the first stage in our test of the new foss-north conference administration infrastructure, and it seems to have worked this far :-). Big thanks goes to Magnus for helping out.
