This was my first year going to the All Things Open and my first in-person conference in several years.

Overall, I really enjoyed the conference and would recommend other’s attend. It definitely helped that I already live in Raleigh so I didn’t have to travel to the conference, but even traveling to the conference would be a good experience.

Venue

The Raleigh conference center is a spacious venue. The paths to the session rooms are wide and easy to access. Most of the session rooms were large enough to fit everyone in the session. The conference center has ample surrounding parking and food options if the catered sandwiches don’t cover your appetite. The sponsor/vendor booths were set up in the atrium with plenty of room to interact with the vendors and still have room to walk past. All the areas were clean and tidy and the HVAC worked well in all but the smallest session room when it was packed.

Vendor Booths

There were a lot of vendors spread around the whole atrium area. The conference did an interesting optional gamification addition to the conference: the keynote sessions and each vendor booth had a code which when entered into the conference app would add points to your score. At the end of each day to top scorers were randomly draw for some very nice prizes.

There were a lot of really nice vendors present. From large companies like AWS, Microsoft, and Meta to small FOSS organizations like the FSF and OSI. Many vendors had great swag and welcoming representatives to talk to. While most of the companies were definitely focused on selling to enterprise customers, there were many that had personal/community versions of the software available and knowledgeable people to answer technical questions.

Sessions

The session subjects covered a wide range of enterprise related to tracks focused on the open source community and collaboration. Some of the sessions were livestreamed for the virtual attendees (and thus recorded) while some were not recorded. I mostly attended the non-recorded sessions as I can watch the recorded sessions later, but all the sessions were well attended.