Linux Foundation’s head of events shares her career journey

The Linux Foundation hosts hundreds of open source community events every year. Learn how Angela Brown built the events program from the ground up

Q: You and our founder Jennifer Cloer were on the founding team at Linux Foundation and you remain there today. How has the event experience for the various open source communities supported by Linux Foundation evolved over the course of almost two decades?

Angela: In the early years, we were holding events specific to one community - the Linux community. The attendee demographics of those events may have been different - core kernel maintainers at one event meeting for critical discussions about the next release cycle and corporate stakeholder members at another event building relationships and collaborating. Still, they were all focused on the same technology and the same general goals. Linux was not yet ubiquitous, and neither was open source. Things have changed, of course. Beginning around 2012, we began hosting additional open source projects, and in turn, hosting events for those projects. Now, we hold events for dozens of different open source project communities each year and each of those communities is different as you’d expect, but at the same time, what they are looking for from events is the same. They are looking to build trust and relationships and gather together for collaboration, education and real-time problem-solving. It’s important for us now to create events that are unique to each of these communities' needs, but those are primarily logistical details, i.e. the type of seating desired, whether they want music at an evening event, favored schwag, because at the core, the goal of each event is the same - help to build and sustain the community around it.

Angela Brown

Q: What inspired you to work in the field of event management? How did you find your way to the technology sector?

Angela: I completely fell into it in high school actually at 15. I was looking for an after school job, which ended up setting the stage for my entire career. It was an office assistant job at a small company based in France that organized information technology conferences for C-suite executives. I ended up working there for eight years, through high school, during summers in college and began traveling to help run conferences internationally at 17.

It’s so weird to think that my entire trajectory started because I took a job that paid 50 cents more an hour than another. As to what hooked me, initially, it was the camaraderie of the team. There is something about working insane hours with a group of equally exhausted people that is fun and bonds you together. On top of that, the ability to create an experience that helps to make real change was interesting. I loved that experience, and the ability to travel to other countries and experience different cultures was a massive bonus as well. When I finished school, it felt natural to continue doing it. I grew up in Silicon Valley and both my parents worked in tech, so staying in tech also seemed to be a natural fit.

“There is something about working insane hours with a group of equally exhausted people that is fun and bonds you together.”

Q: In the fast-paced tech world, how do you stay up to date with the latest trends and technologies to ensure your events offer the very best experience to attendees?

Angela: A ton of research. Skift and BizBash are both great resources for industry trends and creative ideas. Of course, we survey our attendees and listen to what they want primarily, as we know it’s a unique community compared to who you generally see events focused around. Additionally, because we host events all over the world, we need to keep track of things that can affect travel - health and safety and things like that. That’s on top of the actual technology trends we keep up to date on, and for that, I rely a lot on incoming projects, colleagues who are really keeping up to date on these on a day-to-day basis, as well as sites like The New Stack, TechCrunch, Hacker News, and VentureBeat. It’s a lot of research that I try to devote at least an hour to each week, as do some of my team members.

Q: What do you think makes the open source community unique, and how does that influence the way you put together and run events?

Angela: It’s funny, when Covid happened we had many people around the world trying to figure out how to work remotely and collaborate with their teams remotely and it occurred to me that the open source community was really the only one that already did this, and I was struck by just how unique that was, that hundreds of thousands of people worked together globally. Imagine trusting someone and collaborating with someone - many someones - who you have never met, from around the globe. Again and again, open source community members tell me how critical events are in open source because they provide a gathering place for these folks to come together, to meet people they work with on the other side of the world, and to build trust and relationships. In general, events tend to be about buying and selling, celebrating, or education. Sure, networking is a part of a lot of these, but real collaboration, I think, is different than networking, and that’s what open source is built on. So for the events, we work to really create spaces that put that collaboration front and center. Of course, education is important, and we’re short on open source maintainers for many communities, and developers as well. So ‘on ramp’ education is something we’re focused on right now to help more people up the ladder to help offload current community members.

Q: What's on your reading list at the moment? We host a popular Book Club and are always on the lookout for recommendations.

Angela: I just finished reading Michelle Obama’s Becoming for the 2nd time. The book's themes remain incredibly relevant, and her optimism is contagious. When I’m feeling down about things happening in the world, I find it helpful to re-visit. Next on my list is The People We Keep by Alison Larkin, a novel about resilience and redemption that I’m excited to begin.

*Linux Foundation is a Story Changes Culture client.