About OSCON

Once considered a radical upstart, open source has moved from disruption to default. Its methods and culture commoditized the technologies that drove the Internet revolution, and transformed the practice of software development. Collaborative and transparent, open source has become modus operandi, powering the next wave of innovation in cloud, data, and mobile technologies.

OSCON is where all of the pieces come together: developers, innovators, businesspeople, and investors. In the early days, this trailblazing O'Reilly event was focused on changing mainstream business thinking and practices; today OSCON is about how the close partnership between business and the open source community is building the future. That future is everywhere you look.

Now in its 15th year, OSCON is the best place on the planet to prepare for what comes next, from learning new skills to understanding how new and emerging open source technologies are going to impact how we live, work, and do business. In keeping with its O'Reilly heritage, OSCON is a unique gathering of all things open source, where participants find inspiration, confront new challenges, share their expertise, renew bonds to community, make significant connections, and find ways to give back to the open source movement. The event has also become one of the most important venues to unveil ground-breaking open source projects and products.

"For those who have not been to OSCON, it's a great technical conference covering the whole spectrum of open source, including Linux, MySQL, the LAMP stack, Perl, Python, Ruby on Rails, middleware, applications, cloud computing, and more. OSCON always has great keynotes, tutorials, and evening Birds-of-a-Feather sessions. As with many conferences, a lot of the meat takes place in hallway conversations and impromptu sessions." — Zack Urlocker, InfoWorld

Experience OSCON

Through hundreds of sessions, tutorials, activities, and events, OSCON 2013 will educate, provoke, and inspire, with:

Hundreds of sessions covering the full range of open source languages and platforms
Practical tutorials that go deep into technical skills, new features and applications, and best practices
Inspirational (and relevant) keynote presentations
Over 3,000 open source developers, hackers, experts, vendors, and users of all levels—many of whom share your interests
An Expo Hall packed with an impressive array of open source projects and products
A vibrant "hallway track" where attendees, speakers, journalists, and vendors debate and discuss important issues
Fun evening events and receptions, Birds of a Feather sessions, awards ceremonies, late night parties, OSCON activities around town, and plenty of networking opportunities for everyone

Who Should Attend

OSCON welcomes anyone who's passionate about open source:

Developers and programmers
Architects
Engineers
CxOs
Designers
Sys admins
Hackers and geeks
Analysts

IT Managers
Enterprise developers and managers
Entrepreneurs and business development professionals
Community leaders and managers
Activists
Trainers and educators
Vendors and suppliers in the open source ecosystem

O'Reilly is committed to promoting diversity and to creating a safe and productive environment for everyone at OSCON 2013, and at all of our events.

Why Attend?

No matter the economic climate, a strong technology foundation is the key for moving your business and projects forward. In just five information-packed days (and nights) OSCON gives you the tools you need to succeed:

Learn techniques you can use to write great code
Get the information you need to migrate from expensive commercial installations to more efficient, cost-effective open source solutions
Explore innovations in system and network administration that your company can start implementing immediately to increase efficiency
Master essential techniques and advanced tips to scale and optimize your systems for trouble-free, time-saving performance
Learn how to maximize productivity, increase ease of use, and lower the cost of deployment, from databases to cloud computing
Get exposure to the most promising projects and people to give you first-mover advantage in analyzing new tools and software
Stay ahead of the curve with new technologies, platforms, and languages like HTML5, Android, Node.js, Clojure and OpenStack.
Receive hype-free guidance that will help your business build a solid footing for future success

OSCON Kudos

"It's hard to explain the sort of impact that a good conference can have on your career and even your life, but we can't express how much you should go to one in order to gain inspiration, have fun and learn a whole bunch of new stuff you can take back to your workplace." — Martijn Verburg, London Java Community

"As Tim says, one never has trouble finding an interesting conversation at OSCON...the content, both hallway and in-session, shined... there are people I literally see only at this event every year, and while remote collaboration is all well and good, it's nice to have a beer with people every so often." — Stephen O'Grady, tecosystems, RedMonk

"For the past few years, we at NYTimes.com have been attending OSCON. It has become the premier conference for us because it offers so many opportunities to engage with fellow developers. We've met new friends, given talks, led Birds-of-a-Feather sessions..." — Derek Gottfrid, NYTimes.com

"Speaking at conferences like linux.conf.au and OSCON is great fun. It's challenging to speak to an audience that's so diverse that it includes both the creator of the Linux kernel and students who just discovered it exists. It's humbling to know that the intelligence and achievement in the audience dwarfs anything I've ever done." — Simon Phipps, Open Source Initiative

"OSCON is a great opportunity for us to really get our geek on and meet with some of the industry's sharpest people. Love the 'Birds of a Feather' sessions. We had a great time at what we consider the best conference we get to attend." — Nick Thuesen, Senior Software Engineer, NYTimes.com

Program Chairs

Edd Dumbill

is program chair for Strata and the O'Reilly Open Source Convention. A technologist and writer, he also leads the design and implementation of conference software at O'Reilly. Edd was the editor of XML.com for many years, and program chair for the XML Europe and XTech conferences.

Matthew McCullough

is Vice President of Training for GitHub, is an energetic 15 year veteran of enterprise software development, world-traveling open source educator, and co-founder of a US consultancy. All of these activities provide him avenues of sharing success stories of leveraging Git and GitHub. Matthew is a contributing author to the Gradle and Jenkins O'Reilly books and creator of the Git Master Class series for O'Reilly. Matthew regularly speaks on the No Fluff Just Stuff conference tour, is the author of the DZone Git RefCard, and is President of the Denver Open Source Users Group.

Sarah Novotny

is the CIO of a video game production house, Meteor Entertainment. She regularly talks about infrastructure automation and geek lifestyle. She is a founder and board member of Blue Gecko which does remote administration and management of databases around the world.

She is additionally a Program Chair of Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo. Her technology writing and adventures as well as her more esoteric musings at sarahnovotny.com. For twittery things, check out twitter.com/sarahnovotny. To connect with her on LinkedIn, wander over to linkedin.com/in/sarahnovotny.

Conference Diversity

O'Reilly Media believes in spreading the knowledge of innovators. We believe that innovation is enhanced by a variety of perspectives, and our goal is to create an inclusive, respectful conference environment that invites participation from people of all races, ethnicities, genders, ages, abilities, religions, and sexual orientation.

We're actively seeking to increase the diversity of our attendees, speakers, and sponsors through our calls for proposals, other open submission processes, and through dialogue with the larger communities we serve.

This is an ongoing process. We are talking to our program chairs, program committees, and various innovators, experts, and organizations about this goal and about ways they can help us achieve it.

Here are some ways you can help us build a more diverse conference experience:

Recommend appropriate speakers and/or program committee members to the conference chairs (see individual O'Reilly conference sites for program information; you may also send an email to diversity@oreilly.com)
Forward our call for proposals to relevant affinity groups with the message that we are looking for a diverse speaker roster
Suggest to potential speakers that they submit a proposal during our Call for Participation conference phase (see individual O'Reilly conference sites for details)
Organize community-based public speaking trainings and practice events (Ignite is one popular format)
Suggest ways that the onsite conference experience can be more welcoming and supportive, free from intimidation and marginalization (send an email to diversity@oreilly.com)
Share your ideas and best practices for how we can realize our vision (send an email to diversity@oreilly.com)

We value diversity in the communities we bring together, and we welcome your contributions to bringing balanced representation of the richness of our collective human experience.

See our Creative Commons version (PDF) of this statement.

Code of Conduct

At O'Reilly, we assume that most people are intelligent and well-intended, and we're not inclined to tell people what to do. However, we've recently come to see that sometimes it's necessary to spell out the behavior we support and don't support at conferences. The core of our approach is this: we will do whatever we believe is necessary to ensure that an O'Reilly conference is a safe and productive environment for everyone.

Following is the slightly modified text of a blog post Tim O'Reilly wrote in July 2011, around the time of OSCON. This text is our functional code of conduct for all O'Reilly conferences.

We've been contacted recently about issues of sexual harassment at technical conferences. At O'Reilly we take those issues very seriously. We acknowledge that this is a real, long-standing issue in the technical community. Let us be clear: we don't condone harassment or offensive behavior, at our conferences or anywhere. It's counter to our company values. More importantly, it's counter to our values as human beings.

We're voicing our strong, unequivocal support of appropriate behavior by all participants at technical events, including all O'Reilly conferences. We invite you to help us make each O'Reilly conference a place that is welcoming and respectful to all participants, so everyone can focus on the conference itself, and the great networking and community richness that can happen when we get together in person.

One issue that has come up at some technical conferences is sexual or racist comments or images in slides. This is not appropriate. Speakers and exhibitors should use good judgment; if we hear complaints and we think they are warranted, you may not be invited back.

Even more alarmingly, we've heard accounts of female attendees having to put up with stalking, offensive comments, and unwanted sexual advances. We'd like to borrow a line from the Flickr Community Guidelines, which use the term Creepiness as follows: "You know the guy. Don't be that guy." If we hear that you are "that guy" (regardless of your gender), we will investigate and take any action we feel is appropriate, including asking you to leave.

Please bring any concerns to the immediate attention of the event staff, or contact our VP of Conferences, Gina Blaber at gina@oreilly.com. We thank our attendees for their help in keeping the event welcoming, respectful, and friendly to all participants.

Link | 03/25/2013 11:31am PDT