Reify Media’s First All Things Open Experience

All Things Open Raleigh 2015 explored open source, open tech, and the open web in enterprise. The two-day conference schedule was packed with keynotes, tutorials, workshops, networking opportunities, and creative human sign holding choreography, brought to us by @RedHatWay.

Attendees had 13 different break out session subjects to choose from each hour, including:  “Open” 101, security, hardware, business, “open” for the operations specialist, “open” for the developer, and open data and government.

Lunch, socials, and gaming provided a great way to connect with top developers, technologists, and teams that share the open web mindset.

Two Perspectives on Open Source Raleigh 2015

From Vanessa, our web guru

“As my first open source conference, it was very intimidating but also inspiring. The people who attend All Things Open—they’re innovators. They seize every opportunity to research, create, beautify, and improve upon their world. And I say “world” because so much of what I saw went beyond just delivering work to clients. They really up the bar, and it’s amazing to have been surrounded by all that for two days!” – Vanessa Smith, Web Developer

Who Vanessa is following after the conference:

@CynthiaSavard Cynthia Savard spoke about Hostile Design, and her presentation was highly emotional and very relevant to designers; it felt almost like a TED talk..

@GarthDB Garth Braithwaite presented Open Source is Ugly: Improving UI & UX. The talk felt very welcoming, which was a relief considering how out-of-place I felt attending this conference! I really liked how open he was to discussion and how he encouraged that openness among others. His Twitter account has the same feel.

From Courtney, our marketing guru

“I learned how to grow and build communities around organizations and businesses. Ginny Ghezzo taught a class called Growth Hacking to Build Community. We explored a variety of case studies and specific techniques, and she included the audience in the conversation on best practices. She stressed retention over acquisition, noting that keeping a customer is a lot less expensive than bringing on new ones.” Courtney McKone, Business Development and Marketing Manager

Who Courtney is following after the conference:

@GinnyGhezzo Ginny Ghezzo and her Examples of Growth Hackers from Community.
django girls (easy to use, nailed product market)
Code for America (stress APIs, integration out to GitHub, sharing to chapters)
@jhibbets Jason Hibbets who is the Project and Community Manager at Red Hat. He spoke about opening your community. I shared the lessons I learned form his class in a tweet, which he retweeted.

If you could not attend this year, make sure to pencil this amazing conference into next year’s calendar! @allthingsopen #allthingsopen #ATO2015