State of Open Con 2023

The State of Open Con is the UK’s open source technology conference. This year, it took place at Queen Elizabeth II Centre in London, last Feb 7-8, 2023.

SOOC23 is an excellent opportunity to meet community and industry members in Open Source Software, Open Hardware & Open Data. This event was organized for OpenUK, which is a not-for-profit company to develop UK Leadership & Global Collaboration in Open Technology. Amanda Brock inaugurated the occasion with this fantastic keynote.

SOOCon23 program was divided into these categories:

• Plenaries
• Platform Engineering
• Entrepreneurship
• Security
• Government, Law, and Policy
• Open Data
• Open Hardware
• Unconference

All the sessions were recorded. You can access all of them.

Edith Puclla, Percona’s Technology Evangelist, participated in it as a volunteer. Percona provides its employees with some Volunteer Time as a part of job benefits, and Edith invested it in promoting open source and helping at the event.

The event organizers opened the call for volunteers weeks before the event, and those selected received complimentary tickets for SOOCon23. The tasks of a volunteer are basic. Edith guided people during the event, solved their queries, and monitored the environment to which she was assigned. Simple and fun, right? Edith had time to learn much about the State of Open talks.

Percona’s Founder, Peter Zaitsev, discussed Cloud of Serfdom vs. Cloud of Freedom: Why Open Source will Win in the Cloud Age. He talked about the history of how the impact of the Cloud on open source changed through the years, examined the current state, and made a case for a particular way to use Cloud and open source together.

You can watch the recording of it right here:

Many people came to listen to Peter and other speakers.

Peter also gave interviews during the event. Barth Farrel is part of Data on Kubernetes and he conducted a friendly interview with Peter and Edith.

They both had a chance to meet other community members and share their experience.

With Matt Yonkovit (Ex-Head of Community in Percona), Edith recorded a podcast on how to get started in DevRel. They talked about her first six months in this role in Percona and what advice she could give to those who are just starting.

Edith also met Richard Simon. They had a short interview about her impressions at SOOCon23. Richard was part of the press at SOOcon and he has his own YouTube channel about the cloud, the CloudTherapist. Edith also met other amazing people, like Lize Rice, who is part of the Isovalent and Cilium Project team and the author of “What is eBPF” book. Liz gave Edith a signed book.

The number of things that were possible to learn in two days of Open State of Con 2023 is amazing.

Looking forward to being in SOOCon23 in 2024! ∎