Yesterday was a whirlwind, from setting up and working at the Kwaai booth to co-conducting a leaderless panel on OSPOs. Last night I scoped out what looked good for today, shared here for you if helps:
At 11:15 in Ballroom F is Autumn Nash talking on “Empowering Women in Data: Shaping an Inclusive AI Future“, where she talks about something very important to all of us, that “an inclusive data landscape is key to an equitable AI future.”
If you want to get into a technical topic with a fun and engaging speaker, my old pal Jef Spaleta is talking at 11:15 in Ballroom G on “All Aboard! Kubernetes Routes now available for all destinations, North/South and East/West“.
Because it wouldn’t be SCaLE without three talks I want to attend all in the same time slot, yesterday I met Open Source advocate and expert pdocaster Katherine Druckman, who is talking in room 101 on “Secure Consumption of Open Source Software: Evaluating, Utilizing, and Contributing Safely“.
And it wouldn’t be a SCaLE Saturday without four talks I want to attend all in the same time slot, one of my oldest friends from Open Source, Ross Turk, is giving “An intro to repeatable environments with flox” in room 211. Ross is that too-rare blend of expert Open Source technologist, marketer, and executive leader, with one of the biggest hearts I’ve had the pleasure of knowing.
Flowing next at the 12:30 hour in Ballroom C is another chance to catch Katherine Druckman in her talk “Amplifying Your Open Source Advocacy: Empowering Voices Through Podcasting“, a topic I have a strong interest in.
Digging into a topic I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking and writing (some) about is Frank Coyle, talking at 12:30 in Ballroom F on “How Open is Open? Transparency and Accountability in Open-Source LLMs.”
Of course, there has to be at least three-in-the-same-slot, bringing to my dear friend Brian Proffitt talking at 12:30 in Room 107 on “Measuring the Impact of Community Events.” Brian has been a longtime advocate, user, and creator of metrics around community engagement from before he was one of the founders of the CHAOSS community.
Jumping until after a nice lunch to 2:30 in Ballroom B is Tyler Menezes talking about a topic I have cared about since the beginning of my work in Open Source, “Nurturing the Next Generation of Open Source Contributors.”
But why not have another must-see talk at 2:30 in Ballroom F? This is a great two-fer with data scientists Dawn Foster and Cali Dolfi talking about how to go from “From Data Tsunami to Actionable Insights.” Dawn was the first data scientist I ever met and her work on community metrics over the decades in Open Source is a backbone of our indusry. Cali is newer to the field, bringing the freshness of insight unburdened by having seen too much bullshit.
Going into deeper nerd territory is my favorite Open Source princess herself, Elizabeth K. Joseph, at 3:45 in Ballroom A talking about “Will your open source project run on a mainframe? And beyond!“
At the same 3:45 slot in Ballroom C is Heather Ellsworth with “Thunderbird on Android: Late To The Party, But Ready To Fight.” I’m looking forward to switching to Thunderbird already!
And third-of-course at 3:45 are two folks I know from the Kwaai project, Saian Ford and Aaron Vega, to talk about “How to use open-source tools to serve an AI/ML model on private infrastructure”, which comes out of their work on Kwaai.
One thing you might know about me is I’m a long-time Fedora Linux advocate, and so a fourth talk at 3:45 has my attention (and not just because these two speakers got together as one of the many consequences of my work bringing the CentOS Project into Red Hat): Neal Gompa and Davida Cavalca taking about “
One thing you might know about me is I’m a long-time Fedora Linux advocate, and so a fourth talk at 3:45 has my attention (and not just because these two speakers got together as one of the many consequences of my work bringing the CentOS Project into Red Hat): Neal Gompa and Davida Cavalca taking about “
One thing you might know about me is I’m a long-time Fedora Linux advocate, and so a fourth talk at 3:45 has my attention (and not just because these two speakers got together as one of the many consequences of my work bringing the CentOS Project into Red Hat): Neal Gompa and Davida Cavalca taking about “Bringing Fedora Linux to Apple Silicon Macs with Asahi Linux” in Ballroom B.
Bringing the day toward a close is one of the best presenters you’ll ever see, my friend, former colleague, and occasional friendly-nemesis Thomas Cameron is talking on “Automation with AWX (upstream for Ansible Automation Platform)” at 5 pm in room 211.
Also at 5 pm in room 105 is Tracy Homer talking about “Running an Open Source Hackerspace.” Having a place to physically connect is a key element of community that is often missed in the “remote-always” culture of the modern workforce, and I applaud all work to create real clubhouses for us to play, too.
And last but hardly least are my former colleagues and friends Hema Veeradhi and Surya Pathak at 6:15 in Ballroom F, talking on “Discovering Business Insights with Open Source Machine Learning: Tools, Techniques and Tips.”
Go out there an enjoy your Saturday! I’ll be back later with my Sunday edition of talks to see.