Introduction
All Things Open (ATO) is a large Open Source conference, held annually in Raleigh, North Carolina, USA. As an organisation, Anchore attended for the first time this year. It was also my own personal first experience of ATO, and first time representing Syft and Grype at an event, but not my first conference ever.
Five Anchore personnel attended the event this year. This my personal trip report from the event.
The main event of ATO was on Monday and Tuesday, with Co-Located events on the Sunday. I attended Community Leadership Summit (CLS) on the Sunday.
Community Leadership Summit (CLS)
CLS is primarily organised by Jono Bacon, but it’s the attendees who actually make it happen. The event is an un-conference where the schedule and content is not set in advance, but is determined by the people after the event starts.
Jono started with an introduction to the event, how it works, and what our expectations should be. He used slido.com to engage the audience with some opening questions. Jono also clearly set an expected schedule for each session, and was clear on how to ensure everyone’s points of view are included.
Attendees bring topics to discuss, which they write on cards with sharpies, then ‘pitch’ for a minute or so to the rest of the audience. These cards are then placed on the schedule, so everyone knows which room to go to, for whatever topic they’re interested in. It works rather well, and there’s never a shortage of topics.
One key thing about CLS is the sessions aren’t intended to be lectures, but discussions. The rooms are setup with concentric circles of chairs rather than a lectern and an audience. When a session starts, the main discussion topic is outlined, then it’s open, facilitated discussion. None of the sessions are recorded, but people can take their own notes, and will have different take-aways from the sessions.
The three most notable sessions I attended were:
- Hacks - what tools do people use in community management to make their job easier.
- Gamification - Using gamification to engage with a community of contributors.
- Social media - What do we do now that (we think) Twitter is useless.
I have some notes for these, which I’ll likely turn into a blog post, when I have a moment. I found all of the sessions personally useful, and learned from other practitioners in the community management space.
If you work in Developer Relations or Community Management, I’d recommend attending CLS if you can, especially if you’re in town for All Things Open already.
All Things Open
ATO is much like any in-person conference, a mix of professionally delivered talks across numerous rooms, with exhibition space for sponsors and other projects. We didn’t give a talk this year - mostly because we decided to attend long after the call-for-papers ended. I can’t say much about the talks because I didn’t get an opportunity to attend any of them.
Thankfully/hopefully the ATO YouTube channel should have some of the talks captured in the near future.
Exhibiting
We had an exhibitors table - with a fantastic location - right at the top of the escalator, outside the DevOps themed room.
Everything was setup as we ordered & expected, so nothing to complain about from the facilities and tech point of view. Indeed over the two days, the tech team dropped by our stand multiple times, just to check-in and ensure we didn’t have any issues. Everything worked perfectly, so no complaints from us.
In terms of visitors, from the moment we setup the booth on the first day it was pretty relentless. We had a diverse set of visitors by age, background, experience and industry. As always, there were plenty of students, eager to learn about new tools and grab some swag while they listened. There were also a significant number of new developers and industry veterans who were keen to understand what our tools did.
I must give a massive shout-out to my colleague, Christopher, who was on fire the whole event. We lost count of the number of times he gave the pitch for our open source container security projects, Syft, Grype and Grant. As with all conferences, the visitors were keen to get their hands on swag. We had a limited supply of Grype T-shirts which flew off the table - after the obligatory badge-scan, of course.
We all encouraged visitors to take a look at the tools and ping us personally if they have any problems. At least one did, then filed an issue and came back the next day to tell us. I also spoke to people who were looking for something new to contribute to, in their own area of expertise. So perhaps we’ll see some new contributions over the coming weeks.
Facilities
The venue - Raleigh Convention Center - is pretty huge, so the exhibitors were nicely spread out across multiple floors. There was plenty of water available, and lunch boxes were provided. A small coffee shop helped those of us with caffeine dependence, and provided an outdoor fresh air respite from the event.
Conclusion
As a first time visitor to Raleigh and All Things Open, I had a great time. We scanned plenty of badges, had many great conversations, and chatted with friends in the community, old and new. The ATO vibes are great. I’d love to go back again.