It’s Monday morning, you’ve just spent the entire weekend at FOSDEM in Belgium, and now the Eurostar departures lounge is filled with a disproportionate amount of people wearing hoodies and using laptops covered in stickers … it must be the SOOCon Eurostar back to London!
If you haven’t come across SOOCon before you’d be forgiven - last year was the inaugural event so it’s a relative newcomer to the Open Source scene. Pitched as the largest FOSDEM fringe event, it typically takes place on the Tuesday and Wednesday following the biggest open source event in Europe, FOSDEM. Cue the exodus of many attendees under the channel and back to London in time for another two days dedicated to all things open.
And, when I refer to all things open, I mean that literally - State of Open Con, or SOOCon as it’s known, is a celebration of all things open technology, from open source to open hardware, data, standards and this year, a big focus on openness in the context of AI.
Organised by Open UK, a not-for-profit company based in the UK with the lofty goals of developing UK leadership and global collaboration in open technology, the event has become firmly established both in the UK tech scene’s calendar and in the world of Open Source.
This year’s event was hosted at the quirky venue of The Brewery - yep, you guessed it, an old brewery owned by Whitbread since 1750, which has been converted into a really versatile event venue.
Kicking off with some great plenaries from a diverse range of speakers, it set the scene for two days of insightful talks, great networking and awesome social events.
You can check out all the recordings of the sessions on this playlist - well worth a watch!
Speaking at State of Open Con. Image shared by OpenUK Pictures under CC BY-SA 2.0
I was also invited to give a short, 15 minute talk about our changing governance model, which was well received and had several interesting questions and comments afterwards. Here’s the recording of the session:
There were multiple tracks running each day with some really fantastic sessions, and also some great opportunities to meet book authors who were doing signings throughout the day. Unfortunately I didn’t get to many of the talks due to being on the stand but the videos are a great opportunity to recap!
Showcasing Mautic
Mautic was grateful to have a stand in the Delegate Experience area which allowed us to showcase Mautic to an audience of open source aware and curious delegates, with lots of insightful conversations!
A huge thank you to Sam Parnell and Sven Döring who supported Mautic’s stand presence throughout the event.
We met many decision makers who had never come across Mautic before and were really excited by what it brings to the table - and also some existing users of Mautic or people who heard about it in the past but haven’t known about recent developments.
A photo of Sven discussing Mautic at State of Open Con with a delegate.
Probably the thing that stood out for me the most is the diversity of both the speaker lineup and the attendees - which is testament to all the hard work and intentional effort that Amanda Brock and team put into creating a culture that ensures everybody feels welcome to attend and be involved in the event, resulting in them being awarded the Gold D&I badge by CHAOSS. It’s great to see events that actually walk the talk, rather than pay lip-service to bringing diversity to the tech industry.
I can’t wait to attend the event again next year, which will be on 4-5 February at Southbank, London. See you there!
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