It was our first All Things Open, the level of excitement in our veins was proportional to our exhaustion after our five-day trip from Madrid to Raleigh, NC and back. But ATO 2022 didn’t let our expectations down. We had a blast, as Americans like to say. The only thing we could have wished for was more talks and workshops around Design and Open Source.
Carol, Paula and Eva with Paloma Oliveira, who we had the pleasure to meet at the event.
@Eva_Marco, front-end developer at Penpot and @Carol and I, as part of the Community team, arrived in Raleigh and lived the full experience of All Things Open from beginning to end. We spent 4 days at the Raleigh Convention Center and signed up for the main two-day conference as well as the previous two days where a lot of interesting talks on Community Leadership and Inclusion & Diversity as well took place.
We gained precious contacts and had very fascinating chats with wonderful people. Not only that, but also we met some individuals that we already knew via various online communities. We truly enjoyed being able to meet them in person, share and learn from them. At the end of the day, that’s what events are for.
Arriving at the Keynotes sessions on the first day of the event.
After attending a full range of talks (Dev and Community related) and the superb design workshop that Eriol Fox and Django Skorupa ran for non-designers, we realized that Design could have benefited from a stronger presence, simply based on what developers expressed as exciting for them. The open source world has always had a strong background in code but we are excited to see how devs, hackers and engineers are already expressing growing appreciation and interest for Design. We’re sure this will very soon mean more talks and workshops around it.
Actually, we could already sense a slight shift of interest towards Design towards the end of the event!
Penpot Halloween stickers were on fire at ATO 2022! (Picture taken by @Veethika)
We will do everything we can to contribute to make this collaboration ethos between design and open source a powerful force within FOSS.
So, if you’re curious as to where to find us IRL!, our next big stop will be FOSDEM 2023 where the full team will attend the conference and continue to engage with the broader community.
We can see how All Things Open and generally the FOSS communities encompass many more things than just open code, and how Open Source Design is becoming a major stream of interest. We’re excited to be part of such trend!
See you next year at ATO 2023!!
