Did you attend the Everything Open conference this year? If so, please let me know your fave parts or share links to your summaries and social media posts so I can check them out ([@]AshTheLibrarian) 🤩
Didn’t go and need the TL;DR version of events?
I’ve bottled my social media enthusiasm and reproduced a collation of my Bluesky posts below 👇 Each author is linked to their session listing so you can find all the extra links, resources, and recordings (once they are released).
Expanded versions can be found on Mastodon or LinkedIn, both of which allow for lengthier and editable posts (because you know I had a few typos in my haste to capture the gold during each session 😂).
(Also, I’m experimenting with embedded social media posts. So, if there are issues with display, please let me know so I can troubleshoot.)
Day 1 – Monday 20 January
🔑 Keynote: Sustaining Open Source Software
Presenter: Justin Warren, 9:30am ACDT
🎙️ Please Don’t Forget About My Parents! – Digital Exclusion Is Happening, So You All Better Know About It
Presenter: Sae Ra Germaine, 3:45pm ACDT
🎙️ Open Justice Within A Justice Reinvestment Framework
Presenter: Emma Davidson, 4:40pm ACDT
Day 2 – Tuesday 21 January
🎙️ Everything Open All At Once: Just How Open Do We Want Everything To Be, Really?
Presenter: itgrrl, 11:40am ACDT
🧑🏫 Facilitation – How Might We “Make It Easier” For People To Collaborate Onsite and Online?
Presenter: Donna Benjamin, 1:30pm ACDT
🎙️ The Circle of Life: The Digital Skills GitBook Project
Presenter: Sara King, 4:40pm ACDT
Day 3 – Wednesday 22 January
🔑 Keynote: The Past and Future Open Library
Presenter: Trish Hepworth, 9:10am ACDT
🎙️ Tips To Build and Repair Empathy with Other Teams
Presenter: Cait Macleod, 2:25pm ACDT
⚡ Lightning Talks!
Presenters: Many – including me! 4:40pm ACDT
This one was far too long to fit into a Bluesky post as there were 13 super speedy 3 minute lightning talks in one back-to-back-to-back session, so I wrote it on LinkedIn and have copied the post below. (Particularly pleased with how well this post aligns with Talk 5 🙊)
Alas, Everything Open is complete for 2025. The Conference ended with a mad dash lightning talk extravaganza!⚡️
Tiny tidbits from the tiny talks, in order of appearance (and I appeared terrifyingly first) below 👇
1. On open education: “Ask your librarian about the OER Collective and open education. If you don’t have a librarian, I’m a librarian. Ask me!” — Ash Barber
2. On disability and inclusion: “Ability is a temporary privilege.” — KJ Hepworth
3. On running conferences: “You ARE the conference” and “Don’t panic!” — Steven Ellis
4. On openly-licensed personal taxing software: It now includes “pretty printing” and they are looking for people to write tests. — Fraser Tweedale
5. On equitable projects: “Put your stuff on a blog… keep your projects open to and searchable by everyone because to be inclusive, you need to include everyone.” — Vik Olliver
6. “Let’s talk about our purpose and make sure that’s what the system does.” Hope punk in three ways: be trusted partners to First Nations people; adopt a politician; be brave, find your purpose and stand up for it. — Don Christie
7. A dad balancing online freedom with child protection. Monitoring vs guidance approaches. He is the Liam Neeson of cyber security and online safety. He has a particular set of skills and he will protect his daughter with those skills. — Yung Wood
8. On a way to program human beings: “The wild thing is, when you program these people, they’ll actually enjoy it. I am of course talking about Scottish country dancing.” Uses pattern recognition, kinaesthetic memory, and community. — Paul Wayper
9. On making a keyboard with QMK firmware: Why? “Great for macro support, key combinations, multiple actions… Can customise using a web app.” All for around $40 AUD. — Daniel Sobey
10. On IPv6: “6 > 4” (IPv6 is greater than IPv4). A numerical logic argument 🙊 — Peter Chubb
11. On Podman: [whole bunch of technical stuff spoken so fast they broke the sound barrier] then the bit I caught clearly as I could relate so hard: “I just think it’s neat. I have no idea how most of it works.” — Alistair Chapman
12. On Bluehackers.org: Talking about mental health in our sphere (tech). Free anonymous counselling sessions at conferences. Stickers to show support. — Arjen Lentz
13. On gender: “A quick reminder about gender: Gender and sex are not the same thing.” The Genderbread person “provides a safe way to talk and learn about gender identity.” Genderbread.org. Quick actionable: use free text boxes or checkboxes for gender questions in forms, NOT radio buttons. — Sam Bishop
Feeling FOMO?
Keep an eye on the Everything Open YouTube channel for the 2025 session recordings.
While you’re there, why not check out the sessions from last year? 🤩
Subscribe for updates
Subscribers will receive alerts when new content is added to the site. So, make sure you subscribe to stay in the loop!
Image by Everything Open, used with permission.
Empowered OER 