I made the decision to stop going to conferences for 2016, but I made an exception for All Things Open (ATO). Not only is it an amazing show, it’s also in my back yard, and the combination is not something I can pass up.

I love conferences. My favorite track is always the “hallway” track and I really enjoy spending time with people that I tend only to see these events. The problem is that I started to do the math.

In 2015, due to work travel, I was gone part or all of 26 weekends (I travel about 50% of the time, and often that means I head out on Sunday and back on Saturday). That leaves 26 weekends free. Of those, at least 10 are taken up with vacations, holidays, birthdays and other social engagements, leaving me just 16 or so weekends to myself. If I do 5 to 10 conferences, most of which are held over a weekend, I’m left with less than a weekend a month.

Plus, OpenNMS is going like gang-busters, so I really need to focus on that business. While I love open source conferences, we don’t get many customers out of them (one exception is the Ohio Linuxfest which seems to attract a large number of OpenNMS users) so it can be hard to justify the time (although they are a whole lot of fun).

Anyway, since ATO was the main show I was going to be involved with this year, we decided to host a party that first night. I also submitted some papers, and to my surprise two of them were accepted.

I headed out on Tuesday afternoon, as the wonderful team at opensource.com was hosting a gathering for contributors that night. That was a lot of fun and a number of us ended up at Foundation afterward. As a cocktail enthusiast I had always wanted to visit, but it is about an hour from my house I don’t want to drink and drive. Since I was staying downtown for the event, that issue went away and I had a great time.

The conference was held in the Raleigh Convention Center, and you could see the registration desk from my hotel room.

Wednesday was start of the conference. ATO is organized by Todd Lewis, the nicest guy in open source, and he kicked off the keynotes.

Todd’s superpower is organization, and not only did the conference run smoothly, he got some great speakers. Jim Whitehurst, the CEO of Red Hat, did a talk on the social benefits of open source.

We also got a talk from Mark Hinkle, the VP of Marketing of the Linux Foundation. He was recruited at the last minute due to a cancellation, and I thought he did a good job especially considering his time to prepare (unlike normal, I actually had my presentations done at least a week before the conference).

He started off with some “separated at birth” pictures between punk rockers and open source personalities, which reminded me of something that hit me when it was announced that the DB Cooper investigation was being closed.

I think Jim was about four years old when DB Cooper hijacked that plane, but the similarity is striking.

Another keynote speaker was Jono Bacon.

Always (well, usually) interesting, I love how he has been working the relatively new field of behavioral economics into his talks of late. It is the study of how human psychology can impact economic decision-making and I think it has a lot of relevance in a field where businesses often tout the word “free”. By understanding how we behave we can better align our communities to meet the needs and desires of their participants.

After the keynotes were the individual sessions. I had two back-to back.

Thanks to Ben for the picture, which captures me in my full “Fred Flintstone” glory. Click on the pic below if you want to see the slides, and I did a interview for DZone on my talks. I did embed some video which won’t show up on the PDF, though.

My first talk was on the challenges facing us with the Internet of Things, especially when it comes to monitoring.

It was lightly attended but everyone who came seemed to get a lot out of it.

Right after that I did a new, updated version of my open source business talk.

That one was standing room only, and I was really pleased with the feedback. One guy was telling me that he has seen a number of presentations about running an open source business but mine was the only one with concrete examples. I’m glad folks liked it.

Once my talks were done it was time for lunch and I was pretty much done with my obligations. The main one left was to help prepare for the OpenNMS Group sponsored concert at King’s Raleigh. We had hired MC Frontalot and his band to play a show in Portland, Oregon for OSCON, and the Doubleclicks opened. It was so much fun we decided it would be cool to bring it closer to home.

If you haven’t heard of the Doubleclicks you should check out their music. Even if you have, you might want to familiarize yourself with their catalog, especially if, like I did, you think it would be funny to shout out “Freebird!” in the middle of their show (ouch).

The MC Frontalot set was really tight as well. I love working for professionals. We when got there and there was no keyboard and half the drum kit was missing, I was a mess. They calmly got it all sorted and then really kicked it during the show. They premiered “Freedom Feud” – a song we commissioned about free software. Front is still working on the final master and we have a video in production, so look for it to be posted soon, and thanks to Ben for the concert pics.

Even though I didn’t get to bed until about 04:30 (we eventually ended up in the hotel listening to some tracks Front is writing for the next album that’s all about the Internets) I was back up at 08:00 for Day Two of ATO. With my responsibilities out of the way it was nice to listen to the talks and visit with all the cool people in attendance.

Many thanks to everyone who came to my talks, to Todd and Company for a great show, and to OpenNMS for hosting a party for all my friends. See you next year.

I am happy to finally be able to confirm that MC Frontalot and his band, along with The Doubleclicks, will be playing an exclusive show during the All Things Open conference in October. The OpenNMS Group, at great expense (seriously, this is like our entire marketing budget for the year), has secured these two great acts to help celebrate all things open, and All Things Open.

I first met Damian (aka Frontalot) back in 2012 when I hired him to play at the Ohio Linuxfest. I subscribe to the Chris Dibona theory that open source business should give back to the community (he once described his job as “giving money to his friends”) and thus I thought it would be cool to introduce the übernerd Frontalot to the open source world.

We hit it off and now we’ve hired him a number of times. The last time was for OSCON in 2015, where we decided to bring in the entire band. What an eye-opening experience that was. A lot of tech firms talk about “synergy” – the situation when the whole is greater than the sum of its parts – but Front with his band takes the Frontalot experience to a whole new level.

Also at the OSCON show we were able to get The Doubleclicks to open. This duo of sisters, Angela and Aubrey Webber, bring a quirky sensibility to geek culture and were the perfect opening act.

Now, I love open source conferences, but I overdid it last year. So this year I’m on a hiatus and have been to *zero* shows, but I made an exception for All Things Open. First, it’s in my home city of Raleigh, North Carolina, which is also home to Red Hat. We like to think of the area as the hot bed of open source if not its heart. Second, the conference is organized by Todd Lewis, the Nicest Man in Open Source™. He spends his life making the world a better place and it is reflected in his show. We couldn’t think of a better way to celebrate that then to bring in some top entertainment for the attendees.

That’s right: there are only two ways to get in to this show. The easiest is to register for the conference, as the conference badge is what you’ll need to get in to the venue. The second way is to ask us nicely, but we’ll probably ask you to prove your dedication to free and open source software by performing a task along the lines of a Labor of Hercules, except ours will most likely be obscenely biological.

Seriously, if you care about FOSS you don’t want to miss All Things Open, so register.

If you are unfamiliar with the work of MC Frontalot, may I suggest you check out “Stoop Sale” and “Critical Hit“, or if you’re Old Skool like me, watch “It Is Pitch Dark“. His most recent album was about fairy tales (think of it as antique superhero origin stories). Check out “Start Over” or better yet the version of “Shudders” featuring the OpenNMS mascot, Ulf.

As for The Doubleclicks, you can browse most of their catalog on their website. One song that really resonates with me, especially at conferences, is “Nothing to Prove” which I hope they’ll do at the show.

Oh, and I saved the best for last, Front has been working on a free software song. Yup, he is bringing his mastery of rhymes to bear on the conflict between “free as in beer” and “free as in liberty” and its world premiere will be, you guessed it, at All Things Open.

The show will be held at King’s Barcade, just a couple of blocks from the conference, on Wednesday night the 26th of October. You don’t want to miss it.

[UPDATE2: My whining paid off and I got moved to the first day at OSMC. At least one round is on me!]

[UPDATE: Yay! Daniel was able to contact the #OSSPARIS15 organizers and I am scheduled to speak.]

I just wanted to drop a quick note about some upcoming conferences. First off, the Call for Papers for next year’s SCaLE conference ends *today*. It’s a great show and they already have some amazing speakers on board, so be sure to get your paper topics in ASAP.

In November I’ll be attending at least one and maybe two conferences. The first is the Open Source Monitoring Conference being held in Nürnberg, Germany.

I love this conference as it really demonstrates the power of true open source communities. While it is mainly focused on Icinga (and you can hear how it is supposed to be pronounced, kind of like “eee-clinga” with a click, but a lot of people just say “eee-sing-ah”), it brings together many of the truly open source projects in the space, such as Zabbix and, of course, OpenNMS, and we all just get along. This year Torkel from Grafana will be there as well, and while I met him at All Things Open I didn’t get to chat with him much, so maybe now I’ll have the opportunity.

And by “get along” I mean drink heavily, and I’m unhappy that I’m speaking (again!) on Day Two as the evening of Day One has a tendency to become the morning of the second day. Luckily it isn’t the first talk of the day like last year so I guess I’ll deal with it (grin). The company that sponsors it, Netways, is actually in the business of hosting such events so it is always top notch.

The second “maybe” conference is the Paris Open Source Summit which is held the same week as the OSMC. This conference is put on by the people who do the Open World Forum, and unfortunately it seems to be plagued with the same lack of organization.

Since I speak at conferences a lot, I tend to run into all the other (more amazing) people who promote open source. Every one of them has complained to me about the lack of communication between the OWF conference organizers and the speakers. While most shows let you know months in advance, the team behind the Open World Forum tends toward the exact opposite. It is extremely hard to get any form of direct communication from them, and years ago I just gave up trying.

When Daniel, my friend in Paris, sent me the information about #OSSPARIS15, I figured I’d give it a shot. As expected, I didn’t hear from them. Not to sound all self-important, but I travel a lot, usually to work with OpenNMS customers, and I need to know as far in advance as possible if I’m speaking at a show. Usually this means I’m giving up some other opportunity, often one that would actually pay the bills. This time I figured that I would be in Europe anyway for the OSMC, so if I got accepted I would just change my return flight.

Last week I started seeing The OpenNMS Group pop up in press releases for #OSSPARIS15, and I found myself on the schedule for Thursday the 19th at 16:00. I wrote to the organizers to confirm and never heard back, but since I love Paris I made plans to be there.

Well, when I sat down to write this post I noticed that I had been removed from the program. (sigh)

This is very frustrating, as every spare cent we make at OpenNMS goes into the project and changes to flights can be expensive. We are investigating to see if this is just an oversight or if, even after the press release, they decided to remove me from the program. Perhaps it is because the website got hacked (grin).

I hope to see you at one of these conferences, or at another in the near future.

Just a quick note to point out that GrafanaCon is next week in NYC.

It’s a free, one evening conference that promises to be a lot of fun.

OpenNMS’s very own Jesse White will be discussing the amazing API he wrote to put OpenNMS collected data into the Grafana dashboard in a talk called “Tales of a Custom Data Source” at 6:45pm. If Grafana didn’t exist, we’d have to write it, and we probably couldn’t have done as good a job as they did.

If you want to see the future of data visualization, don’t miss this conference. Plus you get to see how we plan to display all of the billions of “Internet of Thingies” data points OpenNMS will be storing in Newts.

With the OpenNMS Users Conference less than a month away, I hope you have convinced your boss to let you attend. Ronny updated the website recently, the call for papers has closed and the schedule is being finalized.

With that in mind I thought I’d share a little about the town of Fulda (pop. 65,000) where the OUCE is being held.

The reason we are holding the OUCE in Fulda is mainly due to it being the home of the Hochschule Fulda, the University of Applied Sciences. This is where a number of OpenNMS contributors went to school and some of them still work there. The facilities are excellent, as is the bandwidth, and the town itself is pretty cool.

The city started in 744 when Saint Sturm founded a monastery there. For someone from the United States it is mind boggling to visit a place that is nearly a millennium older than most places in my country. Thus modern Fulda is a mix of old and new.

In addition to the university, the OUCE will visit a number of other places. On Tuesday night, Nethinks is hosting a dinner for the attendees at Viva Havanna, a Cuban style restaurant (I learned that in German, the extra “n” actually means the “n” sound is pronounced in a shorter fashion than normal). On Wednesday night we’re having the Bad Voltage team do a show, and afterward we’ll most likely end up at a biergarten called the Wiesenmühle.

It is easy to get to Fulda. If you are coming by air, the closest major airport is Frankfurt (FRA) and you can take a train from there to Fulda Station. The website has more details.

Fulda has some historic significance as well. Nearby is the Fulda Gap, an east-west route often used by invading forces into Europe and it was thought to be a primary route any Soviet invasion of NATO countries would use. Thus there was a strong military presence in the area during the cold war.

My favorite “Fun Fulda Fact” is that the monastery there was responsible for the survival of the book/poem De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things). Written in 100 BC by the Roman poet Lucretius, it was one of the first books to state that the world could be explained by natural phenomena versus gods, and includes such gems as all matter being made up of atoms. As you might imagine, there were those who disliked these ideas and thus all copies of the poem were thought destroyed.

However, in 1417, ­Poggio Bracciolini found one at the Benedictine abbey at Fulda. He made a copy, and thus the book survives to this day. Author Stephen Greenblatt wrote a book called The Swerve about the impact of the poem. From the New York Times article “The Almost-Lost Poem That Changed the World”:

Titus Lucretius Carus’ “De Rerum Natura,” or “On the Nature of Things,” is a 7,400-line poem in Latin hexameters written in the first century B.C. It covers philosophy, physics, optics, cosmology, sociology, psychology, religion and sex; the ideas in it influenced Newton and Darwin, among others.

Cool, huh? Well, I have been to the abbey in Fulda, and you can too, if you come to the OUCE. Hope to see you there.