This Tuesday I attended SamNet Vinterkonferensen, jointly organized by ISOC-SE, SNUS, DFRI and Dataskydd.net, focusing on technology, the internet, privacy, and decentralization. The organizers gave me caution before hand as the whole conference was in Swedish :)

The venue was Internetstiftelsen, which is already one of my favorite small conference venues in Stockholm (as we have done many open spaces there in the last 1 year).

After the morning coffee and breakfast, the day started with a talk about "blockchain", it felt more like a 2015 version of the presentation :) After that a very good detailed description of IPv6 and adoption. The third talk was on DNS from Mikael Kullberg. This presentation was a perfect mix of technical details and fun :)

After the fika break, there was another govt talk about e-identification. And it broke my brain. The level of Swedish was too much, and my brain refused to do any real-time translation/understanding of the Swedish afterward. So, I spent the time in the lobby talking to people and writing some code.

The second half starts with Tobias Pulls talking about his work on anonymity and Tor network. There are a few slides with detailed graphs, and I had difficulty to understand them. Though Pulls mentioned before that he had to work hard to get all the English terms translated into Swedish. Next, MC took the stage to talk about Tillitis.

Last part of the day I spent listening to folks discussion different DNS/packets/anonymity related topics.

My goal was to meet more people and listen to more technical discussions in Swedish. So, I count the conference a success :)

On 8th of this month I attended a full day OpenSpace on "Digitalisering, kompetensförsörjning och livslångt lärande" organized by JobTechDev and Sunet. This was the first in-person event for me after 2020 Nullcon in March. That brought in some extra excitement. Then the night before I tried to look for the place and to my surprise we were having it in Internet Stiftelsen, The Swedish Internet Foundation.

I managed to the reach the venue around 15 minutes before the event started and talked a few people. At beginning we all sat in a circular fashion and Leif & Greg (from JobTechDev) started explaining the format and the plan for the day. All in Swedish :P Though people moved into English after Leif pointed out that I am the only person in the room (we had 30+ participants) who neither speaks nor understand Swedish.

I put in a topic on "How to run an Open Source project" and luckily all the other discussions I wanted to attend, were in the same room.

So, my day went on discussing (and learning a lot about different Swedish government organizations) different topics including:

• Micro Credentials
• Data Licensing
• Open Source project management
• Solid project

During the discussion of Open Source, one thing was super clear that all the people present in the room (both developers and high number of management folks) were all convinced about writing and using Open Source technologies. My organization, Sunet is already into writing only Open Source solutions mode. The rest of the orgs also agreed that they should put that in the organization policy and make sure that they maintain proper Open Source projects. After all we all are being paid by the government using public money.

At the end of the day we had a feedback session in the same manner as we started the day. I really loved the fact that at the very end, all the chairs were kept in the exact same position (row/column) and no one even could say that there were so many people in the room whole day.

Among the various organizations participated:

• Arbetsförmedlingen
• Skolverket
• Myndigheten för yrkeshögskolan
• Vetenskapsrådet
• Universitets- och högskolerådet
• Statistiska centralbyrån
• Myndigheten för digital förvaltning (Digg)
• Verket för innovationssystem (Vinnova)

Here are few more photos from the beautiful venue.

Meeting so many people from all the different organizations were a very refreshing thing for my mind.