ConfConf 2025 (English)
by Vasil KolevThe zero edition of ConfConf passed (a month ago).
For several years we have been talking to the people from FOSDEM that it would be nice to have some kind of gathering/conference for people who, like us, organize open-source and similar conferences. Some time ago, the same idea was for an event only for video-streaming/recording (with the working title “vocconf”), but we got nowhere.
So this year, after we had FOSDEM and went to the FOSSASIA summit in Bangkok, we decided to move things forward. We decided to call it ConfConf, we made a simple website, and started inviting people. Our idea was for it to be invite-only, a small un-conference somewhere relatively cheap and central, so that we could get by with a minimal budget. Sofia turned out to be a suitable place – we managed to reserve the conference rooms at the Hemus Hotel, half of the visitors stayed there, and so the 40 or so people who gathered were together almost the entire time.
People came from Sweden, Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Serbia, Bulgaria, Vietnam, South Korea and Taiwan (we should write somewhere on the website which events they attended).
There was some concern that people wouldn’t want to talk, would be shy, etc. It turned out to be completely unfounded – this is a topic that most organizers have no one to talk to, and very shy people don’t organize conferences (and don’t go to conferences to organize them). I don’t think we stopped talking for two and a half days, during the event, at breakfast, dinner, lunch or even on the way somewhere. My head can’t digest all the conversations yet, but we have notes from all the sessions and we will organize them somewhere.
We started a bit chaotically, our wiki-type software broke (hedgedoc is cool, but definitely not for 20 people writing on the same page at the same time), so we switched to flipcharts, but in the end, with people who are always organizing things, we didn’t encounter anything that could stop us. We did a number of group sessions, some with everyone present, and somewhere we have a recording of the opening and closing, which might be good for publication.
(Organizationally, the event was made to be simple, on purpose – so that even the organizers could participate, and not think about the details of the organization. We had rented the conference rooms of the Hemus Hotel, had lunch there, had reserved tables for dinner at the hotel (for Friday), at CoKitchen and at Kolovoz 41, and basically that was almost everything. There was no planning of streaming and recording, no preparation of a program, or anything else time-consuming)
I can safely say that these were about 40 of the coolest people I have ever met. No matter where they were from, they were interesting conversationalists, they did interesting things and had something to tell.
After some rest, we will plan the next one – there are talks about whether it could be somewhere in Asia, or some other more central place that more people can easily reach (if a local team is found in Istanbul, for example, it would be interesting). Who knows, maybe it’ll be in Vietnam…
The whole event also gave me an interesting perspective. In Bulgaria and in a decent part of Europe in general, many of these events were started at by infrastructure people (mainly system administrators), as the main ones in need of such software and with the desire to get involved in getting it up and running and adding to it. This doesn’t seem to have been the case in most of Asia – there, infrastructure people seem to be only at large telecoms, where problems were solved with a lot of money, buying software or some big development department. There was no idea of a neighborhood ISP, someone to roll out servers/forums and other such things.
(I’m still collecting and reading literature on the history of the Internet in Asia, something else may pop up)
Another interesting thing about my explanations about how a decent part of the event organization and all the things like videobox were done in our free time was “in India people don’t have free time”. I’ve noticed this in countries with various clients and what time they write to us – I work for a company of workaholics, and we still don’t write over such a wide range of hours as some people in India. For South Korea it was “people have jobs and hobbies, but they do both putting in their all”, so it might be better there :)
Tags: събития