Reflections on All Things Open 2026

Last year we partnered with All Things Open to present a panel about Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC). It went so well, we decided to send Sherry Handel and Jon Ericson to the main conference in Raleigh, North Carolina. The event was slightly different than in previous years because Monday was a day of workshops and Tuesday was a traditional conference schedule.

Sherry attended the Welcome Social & Panel Discussion, which included Nithya Ruff, who is the Chair of the Linux Foundation Board. and Ruth Suehle, President of the Apache Software Foundation. The audience asked a number of questions, including how to keep contributors motivated and whether everyone is burned out by AI. The entire video is available on YouTube.

On Monday, Jon participated in the Community Leadership Summit (CLS). It was emceed by Jono Bacon, CEO of Stateshift, who shared his "Engagement Triangle":

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Coming off the OpenSSL Conference, which was a great opportunity for the OpenSSL community to build trust, it's interesting to see how online events and YouTube could be ways for us to engage a larger audience. Not everyone can make in-person events and creating more connection points online seems like a good thing to get back to doing. The rest of the day included a variety of breakout sessions where we met with other people to discuss topics about community in open source projects.

A highlight of the conference was the keynote from Kent C. Dodds, a software engineer and educator. His talk was "The Last Software Engineer" and he thought through what would be left if AI took over all the work we associate with software engineering. Without spoiling his conclusion (see the talk for yourself on YouTube) it was substantially more hopeful than you might anticipate.

We came away from All Things Open with more connections on LinkedIn. But we also bring home ideas about how to grow our open source community, OpenSSL, and strengthen the project for years to come. Hope to see you at All Things Open 2027!