The other day I was minding my own business when an email hit my inbox:

“OpenForum Europe is organising the OpenForum Academy Symposium in Boston on 13-14 November at Digital Data Design Institute at Harvard Business School. It is an academic conference that covers questions related to the social, political and economic impact of Open Source.

We found your website Boston Open Dev for the open source meetups and we thought of sharing the invitation in case you and your networks might be interested.

Registrations are still open and we will especially appreciate if you pass the word to your connections.”

They found my little meetup! They are referring to https://bostonopen.dev, which I haven't blogged about in a while but we're fast approaching out two year anniversary.

I got the green light at work and the OFA Symposium event was fabulous. I attended both yesterday and today and got a lot out of it.

I met a lot of interesting people who gave talks or were on panels (they are listed on the conference website):

• Frank Nagle, assistant professor at Harvard Business School who researches open source (among other things) and served as the host
• Hana Frluckaj, author of Gender and Participation in Open Source Software Development who gave a talk along those lines
• Shane Curcuru, Board Chair at Apache who's local and who I had a great time chatting with at the social event
• Lorena Barba, Faculty Director of the George Washington University OSPO who promised she'd write up her thoughts on open source and jazz
• Dawn Foster, Director of Data Science at CHAOSS who talked about relicensing scenarios such as Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, Redis/Valkey, and Terraform/OpenTofu (code and data and draft paper)
• Eva Maxfield Brown, PhD candidate at the University of Washington Information School who spoke about measuring software innovation

Some old friends gave talks as well:

• Ana Trisovic, research scientist and all-around awesome person who gave a great talk about AI models
• Matt Germonprez, professor and co-founder of CHAOSS

There were lots of other great speakers and panelists but I wasn't able to meet them all. There were lots of interesting people in the audience as well from all sorts of places such as GitHub, NumFOCUS, Sloan, Amazon, and Digital Science to name a few.

During an opening talk I laughed when Brian Fitzgerald reminded us that when announcing Linux, Linus Torvalds said it “won't be big and professional”.

In her talk, Hana mentioned https://meaningfulcode.org as a place where people can find projects to work on that are making the world a better place.

I heard good things about Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) and YouthMappers.

I was reminded that Outreachy is doing good a good job of bringing underrepresented groups into open source.

The conference was organized into themes and on day one I spent time in the “Diversifying Open Source” and “Open Source Economics” rooms. On day two I split time between the “Open Source Ecosystems” and “Open Source and AI” talks.

At the end of day one attendees gathered at Charlie's Kitchen for food and fun. Somehow I thought it would just be hamburgers but they had a nice variety including coconut shrimp, calamari, tacos, and sushi. It was nice to walk and talk on the way there, despite the cold.

I gave out a lot of business cards and even got a pull request to my list of open source at Harvard. To local people, I talked up my meetup. To researchers, I suggested Harvard Dataverse for free data hosting.

From talking to Matt I was glad to see that metrics on Dataverse are available at https://metrix.chaoss.io which is an instance of some new software called 8Knot.

Lorena pointed me toward an interesting book called Coding Freedom by Harvard anthropologist Gabriella Coleman as well as a webpage intended to help researchers decide which license to use.

I might want to check out an article Frank mentioned called The Economics of Technology Sharing: Open Source and Beyond by Nobel-prize winning economist Jean Tirole.

This conference was different than other open source conferences I've attended like LibrePlanet or FOSDEM (check out my talk, by the way). While there were a few hackers like me, the OFA Symposium had lots of academics and policy makers who really care about all the necessary infrastructure and support that the hackers need to do their thing. I'm glad people and conferences like this exist! Thanks for the invitation and please keep up the good work!