OSCAL ’15 |Open Source Conference Albania 2015

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OSCAL Group Photo Blog

Disclaimer: I’m probably a week late on this one, but hey; if you know me well, you know I had a good reason!  Okay, honestly I lacked inspiration after such intensive weeks, but here we go, ready for more great stuff to come!

Actually, for a long time I found myself in the comfort zone regarding the organization of OSCAL ’15; contacting sponsors, making phone calls, designing materials; it all became a routine for many months on and it’s quite absurd how much it became part of our daily life, so much it felt very weird when the conference was finally happening.

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So doomsday (or weekend) 9-11th May finally came and all the hard work we have put into the preparations of the conference would be shown in a brief period of 72 hours. Further, it was absurd seeing over 30 speakers from every corner of Europe together at a single table eating traditional albanian dishes and having quality beer while telling dirty geeks jokes. Moments like these were truly overwhelming at OSCAL ’15

Yes, we at Open Labs pulled another successful edition of OSCAL off. I’m truly honoured and happy to be surrounded by so many great people who do great work not because it’s cool and bleeding edge (oy, look at that new JavaScript framework) , but because it’s the right thing to do and important for everyone of us.

I must remind you that this isn’t necessarily about innovation or tech; It’s about decentralization and independence. Think of it like a chain: Open Source & Free Software are the best tools to facilitate a decentralized environment; while technology is the best tool to cater to an open source environment. It’s simple once you get it; no wheel inventing needed.
In any case, my musings about the decentralization, open source and free software philosophy will follow in a separate blog post in the coming weeks.

OSCAL Laptop

We tried to take care of all the little details during and before the conference; something which was appreciated by the audience and speakers. Although within the organizer team we panicked several times a day as if the apocalypse would come, I’m happy to hear that wasn’t noticeable to the actual audience (shhhhh).

Around 400-450 unique people attended OSCAL on both days, making this one of the largest conferences organized in Albania (and probably the largest organized by a non-profit). But quantity was not priority for us (although it’s nice o at over 300 people eating sandwiches, which were made with true open source love as we took care even of that). The quality of the speakers lineup was truly amazing, and I’m happy to hear for all the feedback suggesting that OSCAL is THE regional flagship conference about open source. Tudor I’m happy to be part of the Free Software movement in Albania and with such important milestones in our community, as OSCAL, I realize more and more how critical our mission is. Here is for another year full of decentralization! I want to thank here also all of our volunteers, who took care of various logistics at the venue! I hope to see you more often at Open Labs 🙂 Also a huge shoutout to our sponsors, who made our logistics possible, especially Raiffeisen Bank, the Norwegian Embassy and Mozilla!

Also, OSCAL provided a perfect opportunity for SitePoint contributors to meet in person and gossip about the latest web development trends, As Chris Ward and Bruno Skvorc were speaking at the conference, we were really happy to finally meet our very own editors in our very own city. Thanks also to SitePoint for being a Bronze Sponsor this year!

SitePoint

You can find all tweets about OSCAL ’15 on Twitter with the hashtag #oscal2015 . I will update you when all of the photos and video recordings will be uploaded too.
Thanks to Andis Radio for all the great photos! They are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike license. We are already planning for OSCAL 2016 so stay tuned; there will be news sooner than you might think 🙂

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