New Decade, New Look
January 19, 2020New Decade, New Look
reading time ~7min
For the last 7-8 years, most people have gotten to know us as All Things Open, the conference taking place every October in downtown Raleigh.
And rightly so.
Up to this point, it’s all we’ve ever really talked about and promoted publicly. Building a 5,000 person event is, in our humble opinion, extremely difficult. It requires an uncommon amount of attention, time, effort and patience.
Don’t get us wrong, it’s been done before, so it’s not unprecedented or a feat of strength beyond the ability to comprehend. However, it has certainly taken us some time – and the support of an incredible community.
And oh the community.
Truth be told, that’s what matters most to us – the relationships we have with the people that have enabled us to do it. We’ve always realized it is only because of “them” and you reading this that we can do what we do. And we’ve always tried to keep up our end of that relationship by making every effort possible to host world-class open source events that are accessible and provide real educational and networking opportunities.
After all these years we still view events as gateways to opportunity in the tech industry – a seat at the table if you will. At events friendships are formed, new ideas are sparked, new technologies are started, announced and even developed. Decisions are made.
In the end, there is no substitute for face-to-face interaction in a safe, welcoming and inclusive environment.
And never forget – if you’re not at the table, you’re out of the conversation and therefore “on the menu”. Being “on the menu” is never a good place to be, and we’ve done our best to get as many to the table as possible.
LOOKING AHEAD – MOVING FORWARD
As we enter 2020 we’d like to continue and grow much of what we’ve been doing, but we’d like to change things up and add a few songs to the rotation as well.
What exactly does this mean?
AllThingsOpen.org
For us, it starts with the AllThingsOpen.org website. For the last 7-8 years, you’ve known it as the place to get conference news, see speakers and the schedule, and perhaps register for the conference itself.
Moving forward, it will become the home to everything we’re doing. The one place you can see the events and platforms we’re hosting, and the one place you can hear directly from us. It will also become a launching pad for future initiatives.
We hope this is reflected in the new site design and layout.
In short, the basic look and feel have remained the same and the focus remains on the ATO conference taking place in October. However, we’ve introduced and highlighted a few of the other events we host, like the RTP Open Source and Open Source South Carolina meetups, and new projects we’re working on like Open Source Jobs and Open Source Score, both of which are in beta.
Moving forward the site will continue to feature the ATO conference as well as multiple other things we’re involved in, and we hope this leads to increased awareness and engagement with our community.
What We’ll Keep Doing, and Hopefully Grow
You’ll see the “new” AllThingsOpen.org site still features the All Things Open conference, which we’ll again host October 18-20 in downtown Raleigh. We are incredibly fortunate to be hosting our 8th event in 2020, and we’re hoping 5,000+ will join us from all over the U.S and the world. In 2019 nearly 5,000 did so from 41 U.S. states and 27 countries.
You’ll see the Open Source 101 event series featured, which we’ve now been hosting for four (4) years. We’ll host two (2) in 2020 – the first on March 3 in Columbia, SC and the second April 14 in Austin, TX. Each is a one-day conference focusing on the tools and processes foundational to open source/tech/web with sessions delivered by some of the top experts in the field.
We hope to do more 101s in the future as we have found an open-source “on-ramp” is a much-needed thing, despite the common perception that “everyone now understands open source” and has the requisite knowledge to participate. With all due respect, we have found that perception to be wrong. Many do not understand, and if we want everyone participating, providing an in-person opportunity to learn is in our opinion, vital.
We host two active meetups – Open Source RTP in the Research Triangle of NC and Open Source South Carolina, each with 1,000+ members and growing – and those will be featured as well. We invite everyone to join us for monthly meetings featuring wonderful speakers, education and networking. These are smaller events of course, but they are mighty in impact.
What’s New
In addition to the things you’re probably familiar with, you’ll notice on the new site a couple you’re probably not familiar with.
OpenSourceJobs.com
To help people with open source skills and knowledge, and those looking for it, we’re proud to launch a beta version of OpenSourceJobs.com. It’s been a long time coming, but we hope to finally do online and year-round what we’ve done for more than a decade in person.
Connecting people to opportunity is a worthy mission and one we’ll take seriously moving forward.
It warrants repeating the site is in beta, which means you’ll find plenty of bugs from both a functionality and design perspective, but we’ll work quickly to eliminate those moving forward and make the experience the best it can be.
Despite the “beta” status, we encourage everyone – individuals and organizations alike, to utilize the site to post and/or look for opportunities. We feel open source technology and process skills and knowledge are now needed and in-demand across not only the tech industry but across all industries, whether hiring managers and recruiters understand it or not.
We hope the site genuinely provides value, both to those inside our community and beyond.
OpenSourceScore.com
To help both new and established technologists understand the role and importance of open source processes a little better, we’re proud to launch OpenSourceScore.com.
Processes are most often not mentioned when talking and thinking about open source – they are viewed as being “understood”. But we feel a recognition/understanding of and experience in this area can really propel a career.
In an effort to highlight this belief we created a quick and easy survey to determine and quantify where you might be on the scale of process experience and understanding. It’s not an exhaustive list of survey items to be sure, but like OpenSourceJobs.com, the site is in beta with features being added.
Our hope is that by simply taking the survey a better understanding of “processes” will result, and with it, where and how one might be able to improve and get better might be realized.
While many have been in the space for a while and are incredibly experienced and knowledgable many more are not and can improve. We certainly include ourselves in the latter category and not the former.
It is worth noting that upon completion survey takers will receive a numerical “score” on a scale of 1 to 100, and the tool will let you know where you fall in relation to others that have taken it. Nearly 250 have now taken the survey, which provides a pretty good “baseline”. And obviously, the more surveys completed moving forward the better and more accurate the score will become.
FINALLY
We consider 2020 to be just the beginning.
Moving forward we’ll launch additional initiatives we’ve been thinking about for years from the AllThingsOpen.org website, some small and some larger, and all will have the common thread of providing value and helping the community as much as possible.
We decided a long time ago that business can be done a little differently, and we intend to continue to prove it moving forward.