Experiences @ CHAOSScon EU 2024

While I could not get an appropriate amount of sleep due to the improperly set thermostat and the timezone shift I was subjected to, I was excited about the free and open-source software community conference I planned to visit that day. At around 0600 am Central European Standard Time, I got freshened up and checked with Tomas Hrcka who planned to visit CHAOSScon EU 2024 with me. I also met up with my teammates from the Red Hat Community Platform Engineering Team - Aurelien Bompard, Fabian Arrotin and Julia Bley during breakfast after meeting them the last time during Flock To Fedora 2023. Tomas Hrcka and I left for the event venue at around 0700 am Central European Standard Time when we were done with our breakfast while the rest decided to attend the CentOS Connect 2024 conference. I decided to miss out on the first day of CentOS Connect 2024 to make time for the CHAOSScon EU 2024 and have my talk scheduled on the second day of the event. The Bedford Hotel & Congress Centre was a walkable distance away from our hotel and we got ourselves custom nametags at the event reception after reaching there. While we waited for the keynote to start, I went around the event premises connecting with members from the organizing committee like Dawn Foster and Sean Goggins. The event hall had an attached balcony where a beautiful sunrise blessed the attendees enjoying their coffee there.

At around 0930 Central European Standard Time, Tomas Hrcka and I took our seats and Matt Germonprez's keynote talk named "CHAOSS Overview" started. I got to meet up with a bunch of familiar and not-so-familiar faces like Mike Nolan and Harish Pillay who were attending the event. As my Fedora Council election focus was community sustenance and contributor retention, I had an agenda prepared for the event that I went around with. After Claire Dillon's talk on "University OSPOs and Metrics" at around 1000 Central European Standard Time, a group discussion session was kicked off forming groups of three or four attendees per team. Sage Sharp, Tomas Hrcka and I formed a team in the discussion and this also allowed me to go about with my questions with folks who work actively in the free and open-source software communities. After a group photograph session for the attendees, a panel discussion about an interesting topic "Tension Between Transparency and Privacy in Open Source Software Metrics Generation" started which was participated by Malcolm Bain (from Across Legal), Sophia Vergas (from Google) and Inessa Pawson (from OpenTeams). Every presented session had an associated discussion attachment for attendees to grasp the learnings and address the questions. While that risked derailing the event's scheduled cadence, it kept the conference active and open-ended.

At around 1230 pm Central European Standard Time, the folks from Fedora Project, Red Hat and CHAOSS joined us for a group lunch at "Fleur De Bengal" on Brian Profitt's recommendation. Richard Bowen and Brian Profitt caught up on the conversations while Justin W. Flory, Matt Germonprez and I discussed the contribution retention problem on our way to the restaurant. It was surprising to be served homelike food thousands of miles away from the house and on connecting with the restaurant staff, I found out that half of them hailed from India and the other half hailed from Bangladesh. Once we were back from lunch, Nikita Tripathi and Tomas Hrcka joined the "University Open Source Metrics" workshop and "GrimoireLab" workshop respectively. Justin W. Flory and I headed into the "Augur" workshop with the agenda to ensure that we are not "reinventing the wheel" by creating community health evaluation tooling when we could leverage the ones created by these communities. While the workshop was a bit chaotic - pun unintended - with participants speaking up in between and longer wait times for those raising their hands, I think Sean Goggins managed a workshop that gave way to discussions helpful to both Augur maintainers and Augur consumers. Many intriguing questions related to GitLab support for the tooling and the separation of 8Knot and Augur services were addressed.

Justin W. Flory and I used the quick snack break in between the discussions to talk about how we can leverage these tools in our community. While we were dejected by the limitation of the tools of not being able to use community contributions as input, we recognized that these could be useful for leveraging technical contributions. We also discussed the state of affairs around the revival of the Fedora Badges 2.0 project which has been dormant for some time now and with that, it was time to head back to the main hall to attend the remaining sessions. At around 0400 pm Central European Standard Time, Julia Ferraioli delivered her keynote on "Best Practices For Research In Open Source Ecosystems". After spending some time bonding with the community attendees over some evening snacks and getting pulled into an interesting conversation about human psychology with Nikita Tripathi and Tomas Hrcka, Tomas Hrcka and I decided to say our goodbyes. We shared our findings from the GrimoireLab and Augur workshops on our way back to the hotel where we met up with Michal Konecny and his partner, Noemi Halbichová. We decided to reconvene for the CentOS Project anniversary celebrations at the CentOS Connect 2024 venue later today at around 0800 pm Central European Standard Time so we had some time to exchange gifts and a brief respite at the convenience of our rooms.

I shared a wide assortment of snacks and spices of Indian origin with Tomas Hrcka and he shared a set of homelab hardware that I could make use of. At around 0730 pm Central European Standard Time, we met up at the hotel lobby and started walking towards the Radisson Hotel City Center which was roughly a twenty-minute walk from our place. We met up with a bunch of old friends from the team as well as the community like Pierre-Yves Chibon from the Red Hat Automotive team, Stefan Mattejiet from the Red Hat Core Agile System Engineering team, Aoife Moloney and Sandro from Fedora Project and Neil Hanlon from Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation among others. With a great count of familiar faces present at CentOS Connect 2024, we all sang the birthday song to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the CentOS Project community. While drinking and snacking, Sandro and I discussed the plans around sustaining the Fedora Badges project in its current state and I shared with Aurelien Bompard and Fabian Arrotin, the learnings acquired from CHAOSScon EU 2024. I also met with Frantisek Lachman from the Packit team who invited me to attend his talk at the Distribution Devroom of FOSDEM 2024 and I also invited him to my talk on the second day of CentOS Connect 2024. At around 1030 pm Central European Standard Time, we decided to walk back to the hotel and prepare for the next day.