We had an incredible time at OpenUK’s first annual State of Open Con #SOOCon23 on 7 and 8 February in London. With 130+ speakers, 58 organisations hosting tables and a further 12 provider Delegate Experience (DX). It had an incredible buzz and we’re so grateful for everyone who came out to support us this year and hope that you will be back for #SOOCon24. We won’t be organising that in 10 weeks, but will start work in March.
If you were able to make it along thank you for being a part of this first State of Open Con, #SOOCon23. We hope you enjoyed it as much as we did. You will also have received your free conference hat. We will be announcing a special prize for the best photo of one of our hats shared on social in the weeks to come.
Many people fed back that they were “blown away” by our plenaries and you can watch the videos of these and ALL the conference content as unlimited free download here, whether you made it along or not.
It was a delight to host our plenary and keynote speakers:
- Chi Onwurah – Labour MP for Newcastle upon Tyne Central, Shadow Minister Science, Research & Technology
- Damani Corbin – Strategy & EcoSystem Growth, Boeing
- Eric Brewer – VP Infrastructure & Google Fellow, Google
- Camille Stewart Gloster – Deputy National Cyber Director, Technology & Ecosystem Security, The White House
- Salem Avan – Director of Policy Strategy & Governance Division for ICT, United Nations
- Mike Bracken – Founding Partner, Public Digital
- Jimmy Wales – Founder, Wikipedia
People were at the centre of State of Open Con. We worked for several months with young photographer Tiana Lea OpenUK State of Open: The UK in 2023 Photo Exhibition, sponsored by Arm with 38 key figures in UK open source software. Their portraits were taken by award winning 25 year old photographer Tiana not only took portraits but worked with her team to produce accompanying video. You can see all of these digitally.
Tiana was also on site offering free portraits during SOOCon23 and took 165 headshots for our community during the two day conference. We are looking forward to seeing these in use.
Events like this are not possible without the support and contributions from our headline sponsor, IEEE SA Open and our incredible, fantastic, awesome and gifted and media sponsors.
We are also grateful to the table holders and our providers of our DX experience
DX Experience
Of course the content was a huge part of the event and again, thanks to all of our speakers, and to the rack hosts and our CFP chairs, who worked incredibly hard to make sure the content was stellar:
- Liz Rice and Nick Jones – Platform Engineering
- Professor Eleanor Shaw OBE and Matt Barker – Entrepreneurship
- Sal Kimmich and Andrew Martin – Security
- Judy Parnall, Chris Eastham and Dan Aldridge – Government, Law and Policy
- Emma Thwaites and Sonia Cooper – Open Data
- Lesya Dymyd, PhD and Dr. Erik Riedel – Open Hardware
- And last but not least, Terence Eden, Hannah Foxwell, and Paula Kennedy (who was sadly unable to join us but did so much work up front) in the Unconference!
As many of you may know, this conference was organised in under 10 weeks by a small and hard-working team. Thanks to all.
Don’t forget to check out Drawnalism’s artistic representations of the two days!
View them here
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