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.

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.

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.