I have attended many conferences around the world. Over the years, I’ve found that the ones I really, really like fall into two categories:

  1. Niche conferences, like HugoConf, which bring together a small subset of web developers who like to build static websites using Hugo.

  2. Umbrella conferences, like FOSSASIA Summit, where a broad mix of people come together under one unifying theme, “open,” including open source maintainers, hardware hackers, open science advocates, and licensing lawyers. I meet my own tribe of maintainers there, but I also bump into adjacent ones, opening the door to unexpected discoveries.

Both types have their own benefits. The niche ones help you meet people you’d rarely find gathered anywhere else. A room full of people who care about the same obscure thing you do is a friendly reminder that what truly matters is the people and our innate need to connect.

The umbrella conferences expose you to ideas and collaborations you didn’t even know you were looking for. These are my kind of conferences. Much of my edge comes from finding insights from one field and applying them in another.

I’m writing this now because I’ll be at IndiaFOSS next week. It’s one of my favorite conferences because it brings people across domain boundaries. It has everything I like: open source contributors and maintainers, indie hardware engineers, public policy nerds, and also people like me with ADHD brains who are into all of the above.

I’m usually there from morning till night, talking to people.

One overlap I haven’t seen anywhere else is between public policy and open source. That’s largely thanks to the scholarships FOSSUnited offers engineers to study policy. This is a critical but scarce space. I will be discussing ways to improve this with the relevant people at the conference.

This is why we need more umbrella conferences. They let you walk around, meet people you never expected, and walk away with new ideas or, dare I say, a new version of yourself?!