RichiH
Richard "RichiH" Hartmann is the Senior Developer Programs Director, a member of the Office of the CTO and a member of the OSPO of Grafana Labs. He is also Prometheus maintainer, OpenMetrics founder, OpenTelemetry member, and more. Among others, he was a CNCF Technical Oversight Committee member, a CNCF Governing Board member, the chair of the CNCF Technical Advisory Group on Observability, and other roles. He's the only one to receive the CNCF's "Chop wood, carry water" award for essential background twice. He also leads, organizes, or helps run various conferences from hundreds to 18,000 attendess, including but not limited to KubeCon, PromCon, FOSDEM, DENOG, DebConf, and Chaos Communication Congress. In the past, he made mainframe databases work, ISP backbones run, kept the largest IRC network on Earth running, and designed and built a datacenter from scratch. Go through his talks, podcasts, interviews, and articles at https://github.com/RichiH/talks or follow him on Mastodon at https://chaos.social/@RichiH for musings on the intersection of technology and society.
Session
FOSDEM is the largest Open Source conference on Earth At 8,000+ attendees, it is one of the largest ones by attendee size. It is also the largest one which is completely non-commercial and for the benefit of the Open Source community. And it is the largest one, by far, by the amount of rooms, topics, talks, and speakers. And it's been running for 25 years in a row by now.
Let's talk through what FOSDEM is, how we make it work, and what you can hopefully copy.