Report from a three-day conference on open source in Australia’s second largest city.

 Mathias Bolt Lesniak attended Everything Open in Melbourne, Australia, 14–16 March 2023, as part of the Meet TYPO3 initiative. It is a grassroots conference with a focus on open technologies, the community that has built up around this movement, and the values that it represents. Mathias is a member of the TYPO3 Association Board. See upcoming Meet TYPO3 events.

Linux Means Much in Australia

Organized by Linux Australia, the conference was previously called linux.conf.au (LCA). Over the years, the topics at the conference broadened to cover much more than just Linux, and the name change illustrates this. It brought in new sponsors and was attractive to a broader audience, who felt more connected to open source in general than Linux specifically.

Maybe Linux Australia also needs a name change? It appears to be a great enabler for open source in general, both in Australia and New Zealand. In fact, both Joomla Australia and the DrupalSouth conference (which I'll be attending in Wellington, New Zealand in May) are organized as Linux Australia sub-committees!

Meeting Michael Schams and Felicity Brand

Being in Melbourne also allowed me to meet two very active local TYPO3 Association members and community contributors, Michael Schams and Felicity Brand. As a TYPO3 Association board member, I find it is important to give attention to those of our members who are far away from most in-person TYPO3 activities. After all, inspiring people is what our community is all about!

Michael Schams moved from Germany to Australia many years ago. He is a regular writer for technical journals and has published several articles and books on Extbase and TYPO3 certification. Michael is also behind the release articles for our CMS. He works with clients around the globe and provides professional TYPO3 and AWS solutions. I met Michael the evening before the conference started, and we had a great chat about life, TYPO3, and cloud-based enterprise hosting.

Felicity Brand is a Melbourne native who got into contact with TYPO3 through her work for Open Stratey Partners (OSP). She was soon helping the Documentation Team and Content Group. You might know her as one of the co-authors of the TYPO3 Guidebook. Apart from TYPO3, Felicity lives for documentation and she’s a steering committee member at the Good Docs Project. Felicity spoke about documentation and project trust signals at Everything Open, and you can watch her presentation on YouTube. We shared lunch during the first day of the conference.