FrOSCon 2016 in Bonn, Germany – Report

The last weeks have been pretty exciting speaking-wise. Within a month I got to visit Germany three times, kicking off this tour with Bonn in Nord-Rhein Westfalia of Germany. It was good to be back in the area after more than 5 years. Having spent 8 years of my childhood in that part of Germany, gives me a certain flavor of nostalgia visiting it. Funny thing is, I will be visiting Germany again in a few days.

Anyway, back to business. I was happy to be talking at FrOSCon (Free Open Source Conference) in Bonn about Mozilla Open Design. FrOSCon is one of the biggest Free & Open Source conferences in Germany, attracting more than 1500 attendees throughout 2 days of multi-track activities. It’s inspired by FOSDEM and has certain elements resembling it, although it features a little more of a corporate sponsor environment, which I personally support, as we need to break the notion of open source only being able to be Free as in free beer.

My talk was in the morning of the 2nd day, so I had some time to kill off and enjoy the conference. One thing I liked about FrOSCon was how interactive the booths were. Most conversations would happen there and it was a great meeting spot to get to know new people. It was especially great to meet up with Jos Poortvliet from Nextcloud and Christoph Wichert from Fedora with which I had some really insightful chats during the conference.

Unfortunately I had few attendees in my talk, due to being the first one speaking on the 2nd day (there was a party the night before, do I need to say more). However the talk was recorded by the CCC Crew and can be found on my FrOSCon speaker profile. I do think that Mozilla (and Fedora as well) need to be present with a booth next year,  so I definitely look forward to that. On another note, I hoped there would be some group chat for us speakers, as I was not able to mingle in that much at the conference with fellow speakers. In my past experience, having the speakers mingle in with each other before the conference, sets a really good tone for the event.

Summary

Name: FrOSCon 11
Edition: 11th
Attendees: ~1500 (total)
Speakers: 117
Tracks: 8
Days: 2
Booths: ~50
Pros:

• Great diversity of technical and non-technical talks.
• Very clear agenda with handouts
• Interactive and highly interesting booths
• Advanced infrastructure
• Lots of food, snacks and drinks
• Kids Hacking sessions

Cons:

• No introduction among speakers before the conference (was hard to network)
• Poorly communicated after-party 2nd day