Louis, a few words on this new location?

“This place offered our partners, for the first time in OWF history, the opportunity to get booths in a dedicated, top-of-the-range space set up to facilitate meeting, exchange, demos and making business! Because Free Software and Open Source are the foundations of many companies, either it’s their activity (for publishers or IT consulting firms), or it represents a part of their business, in particular for companies using it. And they are every day more and more to find in these communities and type of software key levers allowing them to build the functional and technical achievements to be one step ahead of their competitors.”

Why does af83 get so deeply involved in OWF, and more generally in Open Source?

“For af83, which works on the digital transformation of places, services and products, Free Software and Open Source are vital. We wouldn’t be able to offer this quality and kind of custom services and developments to our clients without it. And because we also do a lot of user experience design, we must facilitate interactions between those teams, make them work together – and approaches taken from Open Source development methodologies are perfect for that.”

As for previous editions, the program is divided up in several tracks: THINK for sessions on basics, key topics, business… CODE, for technical sessions and developers, with speakers coming this year again from all around the world to share their expertise and knowledge. And finally, EXPERIMENT dedicated to the general public.

What do you think of this year program?

“It’s a very heavy program, with many talks available now online. The committee achieved a great combination of basics (communities, authorities and public sector role, foundations, organizations…) and burning topics with infrastructure, security, employment… then on the second day CODE allowed specialists to get deeper on those topics, with sessions sometimes more than 3 hours long, dedicated to one subject and led by experts, with high-level speakers.”

“And let’s not forget EXPERIMENT. Thanks to this track, the youngest were able to practice the noble art of hacking - or at least experience the first thrills that we hope will lead them to become hackers later, and participate to this Free Software creative, innovative, independent and strong culture, vital to our ecosystem smooth running!

EXPERIMENT also allowed everyone to test, “play”, experiment, in a word use Open Source, whether software, hardware or art. Because using and experiencing with a “digital thingy” is what matters the most: this is what drives our innovations, drives our world, drives this shift we live daily and in which we are all players”.

Thank you Louis for your opinion on OWF 2013… Let’s all meet next year in the beginning of the autumn for a brand new session of the Open World Forum!

(pictures Open World Forum, reproduced under Creative Commons 2.0)