CoLocating Conferences

Has there been any thought to colocating Open Hardware Summit with other conferences? ORCONF is a great conference held yearly in Europe with a huge overlap with the OSHWA community. We could share a venue and expenses while offering a larger and longer event.

It would be nice to do two a year with one in Europe and one in the USA. Add Asia and suddenly OSHWA is
a legitimate global organization.

I did find some of the early history of the summit but it only covered the first few years. Is there a complete history of all the summits with dates,location and attendance?

John Eaton

Hello guys,

I’m here to chime in on joining OSHW Summit with a bigger conference; yet I would like to propose yet another level up:

here in Brno, CZ, every year for the past 10+ years we have OpenAlt, it’s been a local CZ community event (~700 attendees over the weekend), evangelizing open-source to our local guys here. The original organizational team is kind of tired of stagnation of CZ community, when it comes to growth - honestly, everyone, who could be doing open-source is already on baord in some way.

So for 2019, we’ve decided to step it up a bit and invite various different communities to this local community event, scale it up and capitalize on our skill to organize such events.

If I let my imagination run freely (and assuming we can see this vision commonly) - I could imagine having ORCONF in Brno, joining it with OSHW Summit - it would be best in line with our goals, as CZ/SK hacker community.

We, over the years, want to open up all of the industrial automation, from the base level - personally I’ve started from the datacenter point of view with vpsFree.org -> now with base48.cz we’re progressing down the stack, by being economically active community, which has useful outputs for the outside world.

For 2019, I’ve managed to get the NixOS guys on board with their NixCon, NixOS is a next-gen declaratively configurable Linux distribution and with our guys @ base48, we’re trying to bring it towards more embedded environments. Reproducible, mass-scale-updatable deployments based on some serious academic work - that would be the catchphrase for NixOS.

Now, I’m trying to persuade the Open FPGA development hacker community to join us too;
it would be awesome to put this all together and stream all of us meeting together to the outside world.

As a statement that something really serious is becoming of all of these efforts that our community together has been kicking for - for quite a long time now!

Please, don’t hesitate to reimagine it even a few levels up - the only thing I would mention here, is that it’s Jan 2019 now and if we’d like to make it for the traditional OpenAlt date, which is the first weekend of November, now would be the best time to start putting all of this together

That is to say that we have two guys ready to work full-time on this to get a lot of the preparation work done.

Cheers!

/snajpa
(Pavel Snajdr, +420 720 107 791, https://twitter.com/PavelSnajdr)

Few points argumenting for Brno:

1. It’s in CZ: so accomodation & services are affordable & the beer is fine here
2. Brno, having own small airport, is near VIE (2.5 hrs), PRG (3 hrs) intl airports by train
3. It’s a nice city with a nice historical centre
4. Student city - approriate atmosphere for academic/community/open kind of events
5. if we can save due to the 1. point, we can spend more on the party side of things - which is (at least here) for the most part the reason speakers come to the events personally (otherwise we could just all have our Youtube channels and be done with it, or not? )

@jt_eaton I generally wouldn’t even mind calling it ORCONF - as I said the original OpenAlt team is running low on their batteries;

I’ve been helping out for the last two years, I think it’s safe to say that without vpsFree OpenAlt wouldn’t make too much sense.

So in that spirit, if we can bring you guys here and make it bigger and better for you and with you - I don’t view it as necessary to dwell on the OpenAlt brand.