As it’s traditional, here’s a short financial report from OpenFest 2015, with rounding:

Total revenue: 28000 BGN
From those:
Sponsors – 18000 BGN
Donations – 10000 BGN

Total expenses: 36700 BGN
from those:
Venue – 13000 BGN
Renting equipment (screens, projectors, cameras) – 4000 BGN
Plane tickets and accommodation for speakers – 7500 BGN

For everyone interested in the music through the event, we’ve uploaded the recordings from the intermissions in Bulgaria hall (youtube or va.ludost.net).

• Alexander Velin
• Boyan Krosnov
• Vasil Kolev
• Krasimir Tsonev (online, through an audio conference call)
• Leon Anavi
• Marian Marinov
• Petko Bordjukov
• Peter Sabev (in person until 23:30, through an audio conference call after that)
• Stefan Vartolomeev
• Stefan Lekov
• Todor Kolev
• Hristina Nedkova
• Yana Petrova

The committee was chosen to contain people from the OpenFest team and known and prominent people from the IT/Open-source community in Bulgaria.

The propositions were gathered through our system (cfp.openfest.org, the sources are available at github), and before that there was an informative vote from the Bulgarian hackerspaces (the source for which is again available at github), so we would have an idea what is interesting for the public at large. We had to put the talks in slots for two days, in three halls:

• “Bulgaria” hall – about 850 seats
• Chamber hall – about 200 seats
• "Music" studio – about 60 seats

The gathering started at 20:00.

First in the program we put the speakers which were invited especially for OpenFest or were pre-approved. These speakers were chosen through the year by the OpenFest team as valued and beneficial for the event and the free/open-source community.

After that all other talk submissions were read once, to choose which ones were acceptable and which not, and the indication that a talk would go into the program or directly be dropped was that everyone was unanimous in their decision. The process took about hour and a half, which ended with the arrival of the pizzas, so the committee could replenish their strength.

This was followed by putting the lectures in the program slots, and the ideas were as follows:

• there must be a talk in English at all times;
• there should be no two talks from the same track (if it’s possible) at time;
• there should be something interesting for everyone through the whole time;
• there should be place to sit for everyone interested in a talk, e.g. the talks with the most interest need to be in the biggest hall.

Even though this year we’re in a lot bigger venue, our smallest hall is still pretty small (around 60 seats), so we still plan an overflow for it. Because we had two times more submissions than slots, there’s still the chance to overflow a hall and we need to be prepared

Through the second pass we marked more talks as accepted or rejected, and put them in the program.

A part of the program committee left at 23:30, the rest stayed to check the remaining talks and fill the final slots. It was all done by 01:00, after which everyone left very tired, but with a job well done There were a lot of heated discussions on some of the talks, but as a whole we think that the program contains the best from the submissions we got and would be interesting for all of our visitors.

pCloud is a comprehensive service that facilitates access and sharing of your most important data. The service has been entirely developed by highly experienced Bulgarian IT experts and is created from scratch with in-house solutions. For two years pCloud managed to gain the trust of almost 3 million users, and their audience is growing rapidly. At the beginning of this year, the opportunities offered by the service were increased by two new ones – pCloud Crypto – a feature guaranteeing ultimate data encryption; and pCloud Business – a dedicated business solution that facilitates working within teams and processing large volumes of information.

You can check out pCloud’s open source documentation at https://docs.pcloud.com/ and https://github.com/pcloudcom/.
Do not forget to visit pCloud at their booth, so the team can give you details about their latest projects and surprise you with multiple gifts and bonuses.

The dynamic working process usually involves continuous advancement, so the OpenFest 2015 all visitors will be able to join a raffle for 20 excellent IT books on MySQL, FreeBSD, Perl, MariaDB, JS and HTML5 provided by E-CARD. Every visitor will be able to join by choosing a book and signing in at http://openfest.e-card.bg. The winners will be announced at the end of the conference on 8th November. You can see more about E-CARD at http://www.ecard.bg.

Letsencrypt is an initiative of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the goal of which is to give easy and free way for people to issue certificates for their web sites. Their idea is to have a certificate for every site on the internet, so most of the traffic would be encrypted without having weird messages shown to the users.

Their system also includes client software, which automatically renews and installs the certificates, which removes a big hurdle for most SSL deployments.

Their official launch for end users will happen before the end of 2015, we hope that they would be useful for you too

• Electronic identification, about the expected smart-card chips in the personal IDs, which would be usable for electronic signatures and for on-line representation to the state, and
• On-line voting, for the expected idea for on-line voting.

For the first talk the program committee was unanimous that it should be presented at OpenFest – it would use open technologies, and will affect all of us, e.g. it’s relevant not just for OpenFest, but for most of the visitors, too.

The second created a lot of discussions, not only because the program committee is split on the whole topic of on-line voting and if it’s a good/meaningful/implementable idea, but because it requires some special circumstances to accept two talks by the same speaker. Also, the referendum on the 25th of October could render the whole talk meaningless, if most of the people had voted against the idea.

There could’ve been a few different outcomes from the referendum:

• To be less than 20% activity, which would’ve rendered the result non-representative;
• To have between 20% and 54% activity with most people being against – then there wouldn’t be a lot of sense to have the talk;
• To have more than 54% activity and for most people to be against – then there wouldn’t be any sense to for the talk to be presented;
• To have between 20% and 54% activity and most of the people to have voted for it (which happened now, as it’s visible on the site of the Central Electoral Commission) – then the discussion has to go to Parliament and there’s the need of this talk, so we should know what is coming up ahead;
• There tho be more than 54% activity and most people to have voted for it, which would’ve made the talk mandatory.

In the current circumstances, the OpenFest team thinks that it’s important for this talk to be presented to the community.

Because we see that this year the same thing is happening, we’re extending the deadline of the CfP until Sunday (the 4th of October) and we’ll be expecting your submissions

If you have any questions, you can write to us at program@openfest.org