That’s a Wrap! Inaugural OpenJS Foundation Collab Summit Comes to a Close

The OpenJS Foundation recently held its first-ever OpenJS Collaborator Summit. Formerly known as Node.js Collaborator Summit, this was the first OpenJS wide Summit bringing together participants from across the foundation’s 32 projects! In all, more than 95 people came together to learn, collaborate and grow.

The purpose of this event was to bring together many of the contributors and maintainers working across all OpenJS Foundation projects and provide them a chance to collaborate in person, share, learn, and get to know each other. With the majority of this community being distributed, these moments are important for peer-to-peer relationship building, which can be harder to do online. It also provides a space for working groups to hash out topics or issues that are harder to get traction on when the collaboration is scheduled over multiple one-hour meetings throughout the year.

Across the two day event, the community came together for more than 20 collaborative sessions ranging from i18n, Modules, the Release Working Group. transpilers, MDN docs and frameworks, standards and more. The full list of session playbacks can be found on the OpenJS FoundationYouTube Channel.

The OpenJS Collaborator Summit isn’t your typical conference. It’s meant to provide time for in-person collaboration for regular contributors to OpenJSF projects and people who are proficient users of these projects who want to get involved or contribute more. The summit isn’t always an ideal setting for newer developers or those brand new to projects, because the subject matter tends to focus on areas that can require more context. The best way to know if one should attend the summit is by checking out the proposals on the summit repo. 

Also, unlike a traditional conference, where there are formal presentations or workshops, the focus at the summit is about collaboration, so proposals that involve a lot of dialogue and engagement with the ‘audience’ are encouraged. For example, things like Ask Me Anythings (AMAs), or “how should this work?” go over really well. Also, there is no formal talk submission/ acceptance process. When someone submits a proposal and it’s relevant to the OpenJS Foundation projects, it will be included on the agenda. 

Even though this Collab Summit is over, organizers will start planning the next one shortly. The next Collab Summit will be held in December in Montreal, Canada. Go watch the /summit repo for more info on all the past summits and to start getting notifications about the next one. If you want to facilitate a session, help organize, or anything else, please file an issue and jump in. Something really unique about this event is that the organization all happens on Github so many people all over the world can chip in and help make it happen.

Special thanks to the amazing organizers who made this event such a success: Jory Burson, Manil Chowdhury, Eva Howe, Waleed Ashraf, Onur Laru, Matteo Collina, Tracy Hinds, Christian Bromann and so many more.  Also, cheers to the amazing sponsors, including IBM, Twilio, and Sauce Labs who know how to throw a party ( and know a thing or two about cake!)

Awesome cake from the Collab Summit Sponors!