Experts from all over Europe attended this hackathon, from Croatia to Ireland, Poland, and Romania for example, but also from Russia and the US. Usually it is a great challenge to organise physical meetings since many projects are created and managed by disperse small teams of developers. Therefore, this hackathon was a valuable opportunity for community members that are normally restricted to communication via email or online chats, to meet face-to-face and produce impressive work in a short amount of time. The benefits of a physical meeting were visible even before the event, with over 90 pre-registrations applying to participate in the event or in the related trainings.
The gathering of senior members, newcomers and future candidates was also a great opportunity for all the communities, especially the new ones, to host several trainings where they show cased who they are and their latest developments and accomplishments. These trainings allowed for the recruitment of some new and motivated members over the weekend.
The future of open source was also a recurring topic in the discussion. “The EU role in promoting free and open source security is very crucial, because these open source communities are quite often led by individuals and from diversity point of view it is important to have a third player and the public institutions can fill this spot” said Łukasz Dywicki, a senior committer from Karaf and Camel.
This Hackathon was a success also for bringing to light very recent but already relevant communities. The event facilitated the interaction between established communities and new projects and talented developers.
Watch the video: https://youtu.be/W2w4opXaW3A
Browse through pictures of the event: https://www.flickr.com/photos/bemyapp/sets/72157704944222202
About Apache Software Foundation
The world’s largest open source foundation, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary in 2019, and has over 730 individual volunteer members and over 7000 code committers across the globe. The Foundation is currently running over 350 different open source projects across a variety of industries, all of which is supported by its all-volunteer network.
About EU-FOSSA 2
Through the EU-FOSSA 2 project, the European Institutions are actively connecting with open source communities to exchange ideas on how to improve free and open source software. This was the second of a series of three Hackathons organised specifically around chosen open source communities.
EU-FOSSA 2 has three main objectives: improve the security of FOSS, encourage European institutions to begin or continue working with FOSS and make investments in the security of open source software a permanent action of the EU. This project is also an opportunity to increase the response to open source needs identified during EU-FOSSA 1, which are undertaken through Bug Bounties, organising events and activities around commonly used software, as well as developer and public engagement.