Successful Librecon Open Source conference
LIBRECON powered by CEBIT closed the doors of its eighth edition, the third that has had Bilbao as the venue and the most international held to date. This is shown by its list of speakers from more than a dozen countries, the presence of prominent entrepreneurs from the Hispano-German Circle and of reference free software associations such as Open Forum Europe, CEBIT and OSADL (Germany), CNLL and Aquinetic (France), ESOP (Portugal) or of many relevant companies in the sector.
In economic terms, this forum, which has been supported by the Bizkaia Provincial Council, the Basque Government, and the City Council of Bilbao, has generated an large economic impact in the city of Bilbao, according to the evaluation made by the organizers of the meeting, ESLE (Association of Free Technology and Open Knowledge Companies of Euskadi) and ASOLIF
The visitor flow and the presence of relevant international institutions and companies from the sector is clear evidence that the open technologies have already made the great leap: they have gone in a very short time from being considered as a utopia within the ICT field to being recognized as a technological ally with high added value to improve the competitiveness and innovation of industry, companies and institutions.
Moreover, the evolution of LIBRECON powered by CEBIT reflects what has happened to the technologies themselves. The philosophy of this development model, which advocates sharing knowledge, fosters the creation of an alliances ecosystem that promotes their growth and, therefore, that of the strategic sector for the economy and society.
This edition of LIBRECON powered by CEBIT was attended by key figures from the ICT sector based on free technologies, such as the creator of the GNU/LINUX operating system Richard Stallman, the boss of the Gartner consultancy firm for the Iberian peninsula, Rebeca Marciel, or Julia Bernal, Red Hat General Manager for Spain and Portugal, the company providing open source solutions which is in the media spotlight after being acquired by IBM in a historic deal.
As regards the main thematic issues, special attention has been given to the role of women in the open source sector and in the technological sector in general, to the role of the public administration in the "Sharing and re-use" policies that are set out in the EU's guidelines and the Tallinn declaration, and to the fundamental contribution of open source in cybersecurity, big data, industry 4.0 or finance.
The congress LibreCon has hosted relevant international companies in the development of solutions based on open technologies, such as Red Hat, Systems Group, Hitachi, Plone or Odoo among many others.
In addition to providing the account on the state of the art of the open technologies, has been a focus for the generation of business opportunities.
CodeSyntax at LibreCon Bilbao
Our company, CodeSyntax, was represented and supporting Librecon Bilbao, CodeSyntax was partner of LIBRECON and it was at the expo space, on a lovely exhibition stand.
As planned, the first day our workmate Mikel Larreategi was on the main room, the INSPIRATION SPACE, talking about Sharing and Reuse of IT Solutions in Public administration in a round table as a representative of OpenApps Euskadi, the Basque Country iniciative supporting and enabling Basque public administrations to share and reuse IT solutions in order to provide electronic services to citizens, organizations and companies, and uploading apps to the OpenApps Euskadi repository, linked with the CTT, (the Spanish Technology Transfer Centre), a Portal for the dissemination and reuse of technical solutions (services, developments, infrastructure, policy, semantic assets, etc.) of interest for the development of the electronic administration.
Gari Araolaza, our CTO at CodeSyntax, was the moderator and chairman in the TECH Space, where the latest developments by open source, business cases and implementations in strategic areas of the economy, such as industry, public administrations and finance were discussed and presented. And myself as President of ESLE, Association of Open Source and Open Knowledge Companies of the Basque Country, I was at the main stage for the inaugural act of the eighth edition of the event, and for the closing and awards ceremony on last day,
What a great experience for our team!
