###The ROSSConf project, or: helping Open Source help Open Source
Last April Saturday ROSSConf Vienna took place. Sixty registered participants, some loose canons, 5 projects, 6 maintainers, 8-ish team members, 1 baby all in one coworking space. Here's what happened.
####In the beginning October last year, at arrrrcamp, I came up with the concept for ROSSConf. Having attended 1001 tech conferences (I haven't kept count) I concluded that I'm always missing something. I found myself listening to a talk and wishing I could contribute to the project discussed but the internet connection wasn't sufficient for cloning the repo, nor was there time to hack on the project as the next talk was about to start. And, I figured, I'd need some time to get into the project and the contributing etiquette before being able to contribute.
The aim for ROSSConf was to have the maintainers share something about the inner workings of their projects, what bits need love and what the collaborators flow looks like - to then pair program on issues and new features in the afternoon hackathon part.
I discussed the idea with some of the lovely people running Ruby user groups across Europe, like Miha Rekar (Ruby Slovenia), and they all responded positively when I hinted that this could be a traveling concept. A week after arrrrcamp I sent out a bunch of emails to maintainers of projects I personally would like to get involved in and contacted Codeship to get on board as an early sponsor.
The response was amazing and we found ourselves set with a date, location, 4 out of 5 speakers and a logo (which is of course an Open Source project on its own) by December. Opportunistic me thought I'd have enough time during my maternity leave (or however you call a couple of weeks absence from being selfemployed) to iron out the deets. Needless to say the project got stuck in a rud. Until Aaron Cruz created an issue for a page design for rossconf.io. A proper kick in the butt. Preparations were now full on and with our amazing team, a bit of Trello and a hint of Slack we managed to pull of the first edition of ROSSConf, in Vienna.
####The maintainers (and why you should aspire to come speak at ROSSConf)
We were truly fortunate to have such a great bunch of speakers taking a leap of faith with this new format. We'll never forget the thank-you letter Michal wrote for us organizers, or how he requested an unofficial second hack day.
"ROSSConf was brilliant. 29 Pull Requests from 9 different people, several bugfixes, lots of great improvements to documentation, a refactoring, fixes to configuration and the setup process (database migrations, warnings, permissions), and a commit that made the travis build MUCH faster. Plus: a bunch of progress was made towards two features that will make it easier for people to understand what exercism is about." - Katrina Owen, exercism.io
"ROSSConf was amazing, an exceptional group of people interested in Open Source. I got 5 people hacking on RVM and every single one of them made significant contributions. Most of rvm.io code got rewritten from Haml to Markdown. A rewrite that made rvm.io accessible. An implementation of dynamic options for Thor for RVM2 as well as an actually prototype for RVM2 was created, ARM / Raspberry PI fixes for RVM1 were implemented and a long standing issue with automatically enabling login shell in the gnome terminal got fixed." - Michal Papis, RVM
"Eleven PRs and eight issues. Mind. Blown. A refactoring that let us remove the last ABC complexity offence in RuboCop, turning the Attribute smell much more useful for real-world scenarios, a lot of quality clean-up and debugging, making Reek a better command-line citizen, documentation examples and an Ataru integration, a nicer output nicer and a less... smelly codebase and faster Travis notifications. I can’t overstate how wonderful ROSSConf was - putting this together in such a refreshing format was an awesome idea and the lightweight, all-needs-catered-to execution was super nice." - Piotr Szotkowski, Reek
"Since installing is the first step/ hurdle for diaspora, that was also where most work got done. We published an updated wiki entry for setting up a dev environment on OSX Yosemite. Two people hacked on a Docker container and a Vagrant box for easier setup. Final count: 3 pull requests, two new non-trivial issues were opened and a lot of people created accounts. The whole weekend was a blast and the people and the conference were just amazing!" - Lisa Passing, diaspora
"Two people worked on a yaks-rails integration gem, one on continued testing and fixing the README with ataru, and the fourth implemented the shorthand attribute syntax. The Rails integration is working in a rough first version, the other tasks were completed and merged the day itself. I really like how ROSSConf provides an easy entry point for people to get involved in a project. Really looking forward to seeing more ROSSConfs in the future!" - Arne Brasseur, Yaks
After a couple of hours of extended hacking on the Sunday morning, Aaron and Sebastian took the speakers and a couple of die-hard attendees on a tour through Vienna on what turned out to be the hottest day of the season.
####What the attendees thought of ROSSConf
"ROSSConf helped me realise that as a frontend developer there are many complex open source projects that are asking for advice on improving their user experience design or their accessibility, and this is an area where I can really give back to the community." - Alex Williams
7 PR's merged into @exercism_io during @ROSSConf \o/ .. @kytrinyx it was so much fun! viva el open-source!
— Victor Guerra (@vguerra) April 26, 2015Alright, that was @ROSSConf! Thanks to everyone involved for the great time.
I'll stay here at @sektorfuenf for a while longer.
— Richard Pretzelhands (@_pretzelhands) April 25, 2015Sweet! 10 months after starting Ruby programming and I have finally contributed something meaningful. :)
@ROSSConf #stopmichalpapis
— Richard Pretzelhands (@_pretzelhands) April 25, 2015Sitting in the ☀️ on the terrace and enjoying @mpapis talk. @ROSSConf is epic!
— ben ❄️☀️ (@beanieboi) April 25, 2015So @ROSSConf was super awesome. I got 3 PRs merged into @exercism_io, who would have thought 😁🎉
— Miha Rekar (@mr_foto) April 25, 2015@rossconf https://t.co/3jSDgv1mXZ Pretty epic. All my commits for today are merging PRs.
— Katrina Owen (@kytrinyx) April 25, 2015“Collaboration means making compromises.” @chastell at @ROSSConf on open source work ❤️❤️❤️
— ben ❄️☀️ (@beanieboi) April 25, 2015Also, this happened. And yet again I'm involved in a conference where an unofficial hashtag hijacks our entire social media strategy.
####About Vienna (a little rant) We had difficulties attracting participants from Vienna, or Austria even. Most participants came from Eastern Europe; Croatia, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovenia and Slovakia. I am thankful that the maintainers (or at least the ones from Berlin and the US) got to see what great potential and enthusiasm is hiding behind those borders. I'd love to do more to get those countries involved in the European tech and Open Source world - as in: become more visible - but I lack the local know-how and local contacts. That's why I'll devote my time writing the ROSSConf Organizers Kit the coming week and commit to sharing my contacts to speakers.
We also struggled getting local sponsors on board. We were truly blessed with the support of Runtastic, Mjam and especially Codeship - who paid for our speakers' travel expenses and accommodation - as no other parties seemed to be interested in supporting Open Source software. In Austria.
My (and hopefully our - I don't function without my team) next venture is ROSSConf Berlin in September, with Zachary Scott (Ruby core team) already on board. Staying in Berlin is a whole lot cheaper and so are the food options. Berlin companies seem to acknowledge the value of a conference like ours - not to mention the pool of potential hires attending.
####Don't want to miss a thing
Curious what the talk-part of ROSSConf was like? You can find the slides and talk recordings online. Some of the Rails Girls Summer of Code core team members, plus this and last year's supervisors, mentors and coaches attended ROSSConf Vienna and Sara wrote something about it. And then there are the pictures. Hope to attend a ROSSConf near you someday? Keep an eye on our Twitter account.