OsmoDevCon 2018 retrospective

One week ago, the annual Osmocom developer meeting (OsmoDevCon 2018) concluded after four long and intense days with old and new friends (schedule can be seen here).

It was already the 7th incarnation of OsmoDevCon, and I have to say that it's really great to see the core Osmocom community come together every year, to share their work and experience with their fellow hackers.

Ever since the beginning we've had the tradition that we look beyond our own projects. In 2012, David Burgess was presenting on OpenBTS. In 2016, Ismael Gomez presented about srsUE + srsLTE, and this year we've had the pleasure of having Sukchan Kim coming all the way from Korea to talk to us about his nextepc project (a FOSS implementation of the Evolved Packet Core, the 4G core network).

What has also been a regular "entertainment" part in recent years are the field trip reports to various [former] satellite/SIGINT/... sites by Dimitri Stolnikov.

All in all, the event has become at least as much about the people than about technology. It's a community of like-minded people that to some part are still working on joint projects, but often work independently and scratch their own itch - whether open source mobile comms related or not.

After some criticism last year, the so-called "unstructured" part of OsmoDevCon has received more time again this year, allowing for exchange among the participants irrespective of any formal / scheduled talk or discussion topic.

In 2018, with the help of c3voc, for the first time ever, we've recorded most of the presentations on video. The results are still in the process of being cut, but are starting to appear at https://media.ccc.de/c/osmodevcon2018.

If you want to join a future OsmoDevCon in person: Make sure you start contributing to any of the many Osmocom member projects now to become eligible. We need you!

Now the sad part is that it will take one entire year until we'll reconvene. May the Osmocom Developer community live long and prosper. I want to meet you guys for many more years at OsmoDevCon!

There is of course the user-oriented OsmoCon 2018 in October, but that's a much larger event with a different audience.

Nevertheless, I'm very much looking forward to that, too.

The OsmoCon 2018 Call for Participation is still running. Please consider submitting talks if you have anything open source mobile communications related to share!