Exhibits

  • Faces Exhibit at OSCON 2019

    Someone once described O’Reilly’s OSCON conference to me as a sort of “homecoming”. I didn’t really understand what they meant until the team at O’Reilly Media invited us to exhibit the Faces of Open Source at this year’s conference.

    For the past twenty years, the open source community comes together at OSCON for a week of open source talks, seminars, and networking. For many attendees, OSCON is a chance to put faces to names that they might only know from interactions online — which meant our exhibit fit right in with the ethos of the conference.

    OSCON attendees stop to view a contributors from the Robot Operating System (ROS) project.
    Attendees stop to view the Faces of Open Source Exhibit at OSCON 2019.

    The exhibit provided a unique way for attendees to see faces from the broader open source community and to learn about their contributions to open source projects and history.

    As the number of Faces in the project has grown, we’ve had to put a lot of thought into how best to exhibit 100+ portraits. For OSCON, we opted to do a digital exhibit using a series of large monitors in portrait orientation. The OSCON team created a wonderful surround for the monitors which rotated through a sequenced loop of the portraits.

    https://twitter.com/zahedab/status/1150624626688442368?s=21

    Another cool feature of the exhibit were the unique QR codes that we added to each photograph. Viewers could scan any Face’s QR code with their mobile phone to pull up detailed caption info about the person from our website.

    I want to thank the team at O’Reilly for making this happen. It personally meant a lot to me to see the OSCON community interact with the exhibit. And yes, it really did feel like coming home.

  • All Things Open 2018

    All Things Open 2018

    One of the biggest project hurdles we face is the logistics of scheduling photo shoots with participants.

    The truth be told, people involved in open source are busy and in high demand! When you combine that fact with my schedule, it’s not uncommon for it to sometimes take months (or even years) to schedule portrait sittings.

    Luckily, a lot of participants are based in,  or travel to, Silicon Valley and New York City where I can often find a time to bring them into the studio. Other times, we have to pack the car (or get on a plane) and bring the studio to them.

    That’s exactly what we did in October when Todd Lewis from All Things Open reached out to see if we wanted to photograph at their very cool conference.

    I love doing location shoots but they are are not inexpensive. Aside from the obvious travel costs, we have to rent the space, staff and equipment needed to setup and tear down a mini photo studio.

    Thankfully, the wonderful folks at Red Hat were keen to sponsor the shoot and bring us out to Raleigh for the conference. Over the course of three days we turned a blessedly empty hotel conference room into a photo studio where we were able to photograph ten amazing speakers plus one of the seminal figures in the history of open source!

    Also, while we were in town, Red Hat sponsored a really cool “mini exhibit” of the project where we displayed twenty-five of the photographs on a large, free standing, high resolution, monitor placed in the conference’s exhibit hall. Every time one of the 4,000+ conference attendees passed by the monitor, they learned about a new Face of open source as they made their way to and from sessions and meals.

    We even had a celebrity sighting!

    https://twitter.com/jehb/status/1054771267012886528?s=11

    The digital display was a very impactful way to exhibit the photographs. It was also much less expensive than crating and shipping physical prints across the country. I’m excited to use more of these free standing monitors in future conference exhibits.

    To cap things off, we also did a limited print run of the first Faces of Open Source “magazine” which I signed and gave away to 400 attendees. I love the magazine format and hope to use it to publish new Faces between the larger book releases.

    I want to give a sincere thank you to everyone involved in making this trip such a success! The team at All Things Open was absolutely wonderful to work with throughout the conference. They really went out of their way to make us feel welcome and fully supported. Also, once again thank you to Red Hat for sponsoring this photo shoot and exhibit. We couldn’t have done it without your support!

    Stay tuned.

    IMG_8348 by .

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