The OC: All three members of the OC 2014 are part of a team organizing an annual local Open Source (and not only) dedicated conference in Sofia for different years from 2003 to 2013. OpenFest is held over two days during a weekend in November and usually has a main track and in two or three one-day half-day supporting track. OpenFest attendance is free, and the conference is being organized entirely based on sponsor income and volunteer work from the team.
As part of the team, Shteryana’s main responsibility is organizing the BSDCon track – finding talks and speakers for a one day track of OpenFest, organize the BSDA exam, moderate the track, gather presentations, etc. Stoyan and Hristina have been among main coordinators of the event – responsible for booking venues, flights, hotels for speakers (OpenFest usually has 5 to 10 international speakers), issuing call for papers, putting up the conference timeline based on accepted talks, printing schedule and posters, t-shirts etc. We also have dedicated sub-teams on the team that are responsible for the network connectivity, video recording/streaming and marketing/media relations.
Local community: Open Source is popular in Bulgaria and there’s a large open source community in Sofia, unfortunately the BSD community isn’t that big. The BSDCon track at OpenFest gathers around 50-60 people the last couple of years, but we expect we can attract a larger group of local people that will be interested in an international event such as EuroBSDCon
