OsmoCon 2017 Review

It's already one week past the event, so I really have to sit down and write some rewview on the first public Osmocom Conference ever: OsmoCon 2017.

The event was a huge success, by all accounts.

  • We've not only been sold out, but we also had to turn down some last minute registrations due to the venue being beyond capacity (60 seats). People traveled from Japan, India, the US, Mexico and many other places to attend.

  • We've had an amazing audience ranging from commercial operators to community cellular operators to professional developers doing work relate to osmocom, academia, IT security crowds and last but not least enthusiasts/hobbyists, with whom the project[s] started.

  • I've received exclusively positive feedback from many attendees

  • We've had a great programme. Some part of it was of introductory nature and probably not too interesting if you've been in Osmocom for a few years. However, the work on 3G as well as the current roadmap was probably not as widely known yet. Also, I really loved to see Roch's talk about Running a commercial cellular network with Osmocom software as well as the talk on Facebook's OpenCellular BTS hardware and the Community Cellular Manager.

  • We have very professional live streaming + video recordings courtesy of the C3VOC team. Thanks a lot for your support and for having the video recordings of all talks online already at the next day after the event.

We also received some requests for improvements, many of which we will hopefully consider before the next Osmocom Conference:

  • have a multiple day event. Particularly if you're traveling long-distance, it is a lot of overhead for a single-day event. We of course fully understand that. On the other hand, it was the first Osmocom Conference, and hence it was a test balloon where it was initially unclear if we'll be able to get a reasonable number of attendees interested at all, or not. And organizing an event with venue and talks for multiple days if in the end only 10 people attend would have been a lot of effort and financial risk. But now that we know there are interested folks, we can definitely think of a multiple day event next time

  • Signs indicating venue details on the last meters. I agree, this cold have been better. The address of the venue was published, but we could have had some signs/posters at the door pointing you to the right meeting room inside the venue. Sorry for that.

  • Better internet connectivity. This is a double-edged sword. Of course we want our audience to be primarily focused on the talks and not distracted :P I would hope that most people are able to survive a one day event without good connectivity, but for sure we will have to improve in case of a multiple-day event in the future

In terms of my requests to the attendees, I only have one

  • Participate in the discussions on the schedule/programme while it is still possible to influence it. When we started to put together the programme, I posted about it on the openbsc mailing list and invited feedback. Still, most people seem to have missed the time window during which talks could have been submitted and the schedule still influenced before finalizing it

  • Register in time. We have had almost no registrations until about two weeks ahead of the event (and I was considering to cancel it), and then suddenly were sold out in the week ahead of the event. We've had people who first booked their tickets, only to learn that the tickets were sold out. I guess we will introduce early bird pricing and add a very expensive last minute ticket option next year in order to increase motivation to register early and thus give us flexibility regarding venue planning.

Thanks again to everyone involved in OsmoCon 2017!

Ok, now, all of you who missed the event: Go to https://media.ccc.de/c/osmocon17 and check out the recordings. Have fun!