Last week I attended FOSSAsia Summit 2026 in Bankok. This already seems a long time ago, as I’ve been in Berlin this week for FOSSBackstage (see other blog post, later today).
[Photos]
I’ve been attending FOSSAsia for several years – several times in Singapore, and 2 years ago in Hanoi. It’s pretty high on my list of favorite conferences, for a number of reasons.
The audience is young and passionate. In many ways it reminds me of open source conferences in the 90s and early 2000s in terms of the excitement and eagerness to learn. And this far along in the open source journey, it’s great to see young people still doing cool stuff and pushing the boundaries of what’s possible.
Also, the Asian perspective is so important. It makes us reconsider some of the things that we assume with the US/EU lens. The focus on sovereignty has been pretty strong in European conferences the last few years. This is even more the case for the Asia audience, who are torn between the cultural/technological imperialism of US companies and Chinese companies, and looking for ways to remain sovereign while also benefiting from open source innovation.
FOSSAsia prioritizes first-time speakers. While this can lead to some unpolished presentations, it also means that you don’t get the same talks you’ve seen elsewhere, and the same faces. This has a number of other positive side effects, too, including seeing the Shoshin – Beginner’s Mind – in action, which consistently leads to insights about assumptions that one makes when one has been doing this stuff for decades. I attended a number of talks that made me think anew about how we can do a better job of new contributor onboarding, for example.
I have roughly 10 pages of notes from the event. Much of it is in the form of ToDo lists that came from insights from talks, and as such is a little hard to summarize.
Airflow onboarding
One talk stands out. I attended an Airflow Contributor Onboarding workshop, led by Kan Ouivirach. Not because I intend to contribute to Airflow (although, who knows?!) but because I had heard that they way the run these was fantastic, and I wanted to see what recommendations we need to document for other projects at the ASF.
This did lead to several specific actionable notes.
Airflow has [CONTRIBUTION OPPORTUNITY] emails that go to the dev mailing list (example), which is a way to document something that needs to be done (preferably linking to a ticket) in a way that encourages someone to step up and do it, or help doing it, and doesn’t “lick the cookie.” I will be adopting this convention elsewhere.
I liked that “connect with people” was an explicit part of the contribution workflow. You cannot make a meaningful contribution to an open source project if you don’t talk to the other participants, advocate for your change, and build trust and relationships. The Github contributor workflow has created a world where so many people toss a PR into the stack, and that’s the end of their engagement.
I noticed, in the onboarding docs, that a number of steps assumed that people just know how to do them, and this may be a place that I make some contributions. Specifically, a lot of things around git, github, and docker, assume you Just Know. And this is always a challenge with these things – what’s the minimum that you’re able to assume that your audience knows? You have to start somewhere. But, for myself, I *always* struggle with the “just run this thing in docker” kinds of instructions, and pretty much am never able to get that working.
AI, AI, and more AI
Every talk was about AI. And the talks that weren’t about AI spent a lot of time talking about AI.
Since this time last year, I’ve set aside a bit of my skepticism about AI. but I still get weary of it being everywhere, all the time. This was different. There were a lot of practical, immediately applicable talks that showed how to use AI to accomplish meaningful things, but not making it the small god that we worship. I appreciated that.
There was a tutorial on using ollama. This has been on my ToDo list for a while, and in an hour I got over some of the initial hurdles, as well as the “just getting around to it” part of things. I’m looking forward to seeing what I can accomplish with a local ollama instance and private data, and without burning cloud credits every time I want to do something.
Conclusion
FOSSAsia is always worth the trip, even though it’s a slogging journey half way around the world. And if you want to reach a young, passionate open source audience, this is the event to sponsor and show up at.
A+, will attend again.