o'pen

What is it that brings people from other side of the the continent or even the globe to attend a free event on open culture, open source and data?

One word - togetherness. Or if you prefer - empathy.

Open Fest 2019 is among the most empathetic festival/conference/event, one can find, basically a gathering of like-minded souls of any age and gender. It is even originally dedicated to open source, but now stretched to all kinds of open culture - from

Like... this feeling of meeting other parts of one's soul looking back from the eyes of people met - is hard to describe.

And probably this empathy is one reason that OpenFest been going steady for 17 years and had its annual edition at Sofia's John Atanasov forum.

It is also a completely voluntary event. Which makes it not only unique, but also quite accessible.

Event where you can help put the network together, or organize a workshop (even non-technical), or bring important topic on open culture/data/software/knowledge forward and have it presented to a substantial amount of focused listeners. Or even take the keynote.

Basically - one is welcome to join, as long as capable, in any aspect, area, activity, and learn or help things happen.

The festival runs two days. It is prepared by a relatively small group of volunteers - roughly 80 people split in several teams - media, streaming, networking, logistics and speakers. It takes several months to coordinate presently three rooms of speakers, but the vast amount of activities takes place a month before the event.

The program features variety of topics ranging from how to avoid burnouts to how the linux kernel got patched to avoid Spectre and Meltdown hardware bugs. And much more.

I got myself involved as keynote speaker, and had additional lecture on teaching programming. It was confirmed three weeks before the event, after the team evaluated the call for papers.

It is not everyday that you can meet speakers like Steven Rostedt and has an opportunity to as simple as that - approach and converse with. He's a Linux Kernel developer, that you, as you read this article, probably run code from. (note: he worked on the kernel scheduler, and many other parts).

While preparing for the event figured that my services can also benefit other areas of the event, and guess what - it was welcome, no one said no, or cursed or tried to outsmart decisions. Eventually I ended doing live interviews, because... no one had done any so far, so it was good as experiment, and even moved some boxes and helpe some other speakers do so.

One person, who is responsible for volunteer teams at FOSDEM (note: biggest opensource conference in Brussels, roughly 15k visitors) was also attending - as speaker, herald, and helping move boxes around. Incredible you may say - quite natural says he.

The team itself is suspiciously happy, considering the fact that no prayers to higher deities take place neither intake for forbidden substances. It is just the pure pleasure of contributing one's time and effort to bring to life an event of massive importance that shows that people can work and coexist together brought by the idea of openness.

Like other events there's certain chain of command, surely some elders know better how to approach complex issues, but then the team quite flat with no benevolent dictators or absolute leaders.

One can easily feel the spirit and see very young people working together delivering in days time what other companies and commercial teams need weeks and bags for.

Even some really peculiar details are taken care of such as:

• free coffee for everyone - literary all visitors and crew
• free lunches and dinners
• free high quality real time filming, mixing, and streaming of all three rooms
• free entrance
• free water, free tshirts
• free high quality speakers
• FREE LECTURES OF HIGHEST QUALITY

I have attended and actually worked on many events of different nature - technical, musical, educational. Maybe 400+, not so many of them about open culture, but some really big and some also open by nature. I've never felt so good on Mondays, where typically one would want to sleep the day of.

OpenFest2020 is coming and promised to be substantial as a 2020 year supposes. Make sure to attend, you're only missing if not.