Matthias J Mair

Following the theme of this year - visiting OSS / chaos events where I can - I went to the Grazer Linuxtage. It was worth it.

Compared to the FOSDEM, the Grazer Linuxtage are a much smaller event. There were a handful of lecture halls in a TU Graz campus with one day of mainly workshops and one day of talks. All much more relaxed compared to the numbers at FOSDEM.

What stood out to me is the (from my POC) much more approachable atmosphere to everything happening. Some of the talks were in (some dialect of) German¹, there were a few that related directly to the local University², the local hacker space or Austria. This might be a language bias - I very much love the diverse languages of Austria and the ruggedness that sometimes lies in our use of it.

Most³ of the talks were not as technical and high-paced as something like FOSDEM or the Hardware / Security tracks at CCC but TBH I think that is a good thing. It was very approachable, and I think I could bring a lot of people without them being completely bored or overwhelmed. Which seems like a good thing for a "local" event.

My favorite talk was by Cat Easdon. She presented an overview of Privacy at Code Level - an area that I have been looking into professionally and personally for a while. It is a complex thing to model and think about in practice and I think she did a great job of giving an overview of the different aspects and how they relate to each other. There is not much in terms of: do this and you are good, but that is probably the honest way to present it. From what I gather she is working at Dynatrace, which seem to be doing great talks in general. Last year had a great talk about OpenFeature. I like how subtle they kept the corporate marketing, some companies could learn from that.

A closing note: The way that Grazer Linuxtage is organised seems like the perfect template for this size of event. Good website, good communication on mastodon and via newsletter, a good CfP process and what seems like a balanced approach to handle sponsor relationships to support the whole thing.

The IT team at TU Graz also seems to be cool. They let people from the local hacker space use a part of the abandoned university telephone lines to run their own manual telephone operation (think 2 wires and a crank). The ZID at my university would have never.