Kansas Linux Fest 2017

24 May 2017

Kansas Linux Fest (2017)

Backstory

Founded in 2015, Kansas Linux Fest is Wichita’s premiere open source conference.

I became aware of KLF in 2016 by way of devICT’s Slack group. Although I was unable to attend that year, the festival remained in the back of my mind. When the opportunity to attend this year came around, I jumped at the chance.

It’s hard to beat free

With sponsorships from Wichita State and some software companies, the Fest is able to offer attendance for no charge. As I had been recently laid off, this was a great boon. I felt this so generous that I offered to volunteer my time to help with setup, breakdown and other tasks as needed.

Result!

The fest ran very smoothly. Schedule conflicts with Mother’s Day as well as Wichita State graduation meant attendance was slightly lower than expected, but I met a lot of great folks and heard some interesting talks.

Aaron Mackey from the Electronic Frontier Foundation gave the keynote address, Resetting Government Data Permissions. Mackey gave a great talk about the way data is currently gathered using Freedom of Information Act requests (short version: It’s convoluted) and the way it could or should be.

From there, Aaron offered a number of solutions-oriented ways to approach local lawmakers and influencers in order to encourage them to open up access and availability to government data. The strategy I liked most was selling lawmakers on the long-term benefits of making data more easily available; not the least of which is increased innovation and an ability to publicly quantify the positive effects of policies that lawmaker supports.

Further Notes

Other personal highlights included Peter Karman’s talk, Civic Tech: Open Source and Government, and Mathew Robinson’s How to Start a (Successful?) Open Source Project. Karman currently works for 18F, an office of the General Services Administration that works with other government agencies to improve their public-facing web presence, project management workflows and other technology concerns. His call to encourage others into civic service was inspiring.

Robinson is a sysadmin from Cincinnati. After searching high and low for a worthwhile bug tracking and ticketing solution, Mathew started his own. He named it Praelatus and built the project primarily with just one other developer. Using the the techniques illustrated in his talk, the Praelatus project has almost 1500 commits from several contributors and boast a growing userbase.

Robinson’s talk centered around how to grow an open source project past the ‘weekend hackathon’ stage that the vast majority of programming projects stall out in. Focusing on What, Why, and For Whom as the primary questions, Mathew covered how to find people to help, best practices for managing the project and its contributors, and how to promote the project to your friends, peers, and family.

Going Forward

Overall I enjoyed my time at Kansas Linux Fest. Working with the other volunteers and committee members was fun and rewarding. I have great hopes that the fest will continue to grow year over year. I wish to work more closely with the organizing committee to expand the conference’s social media presence, keeping KLF in the Wichita tech scene’s collective conscience.