The Eventapalooza Podcast

A vendor and an end-user on the same stage does more for open source adoption than any case study you could write yourself. Dan Brown is a Marketing and Communications Director at the Linux Foundation, where he has worked for roughly 12 years across event strategy and marketing for projects including LF Energy, Decentralized Trust (formerly Hyperledger), Confidential Computing, and Linux Foundatio...

A security veteran explains why the real threats at your event are never the ones metal detectors are built to catch. John Lafferty is a sports, entertainment, and hospitality security consultant who started as a stagehand and arena snow-removal worker before moving through convention center operations, military police service, and freelance security work for clients including the Linux Foundation...

Two decades of technical events, one airfield in Ireland, and a helicopter rescue that explains more about event design than any conference playbook. Trishan de Lanerolle is a strategic programs manager at F5, a cybersecurity and network security company, where he focuses on AI initiatives. He spent the earlier part of his career organizing and producing developer-focused open source events at the...

Most conferences spend 80% of their budget on a single day and walk away from the content gold mine sitting in their hard drives. Aaron Griswold (known as Grizz in the open source world) is Head of Events and Media at FINOS, part of the Linux Foundation, where he produces the Open Source in Finance Forum in London, New York, and most recently Toronto. With 17 years in events spanning design/develo...

Most events claim to be about business, but fewer than 10% of sessions actually deliver on it — and Julius Solaris has the research to prove it. Julius Solaris is the founder of BoldPush, a newsletter, community, and consultancy focused on the events industry. He previously founded and sold EventMB (2019) and has worked inside major event-tech platforms including Hopin. In this episode, he and Tim...

The best events don't fight the setting — they let it do the work. Bill Mulligan is a Berlin-based tech professional, run club captain, and former research scientist with a master's from Oxford. In this episode, he shares his favorite event he's ever produced: a Harry Potter-themed ball at Oxford, planned while he was a student, complete with butterbeer, mandrake cakes, and 200 attendees in a form...

Most events are planned. A few are designed — and the difference shows up in how people move through a room. Mallory Gott — co-owner of a Las Vegas restaurant and newly appointed executive director of the Nevada Psychology Association — brings a background in adult education and event strategy to this conversation. We cover what separates experience design from execution-focused event planning, dr...

Face-to-face events are still the most powerful tool for trust-building in technical communities — but only if you design them that way. Brandon Wick, head of marketing at NetActuate, has been running and attending technology events for 20 years — including large open source summits under the Linux Foundation umbrella. In this episode, he and host Tim Arthur dig into the specific choices that made...

Most conferences are optimized for the wrong thing — and the people running them know it.  Adam Cuppy is a technologist, speaker, and event organizer who has served on the organizing committees for RailsConf and RubyConf, planned franchise culture events at Dutch Bros Coffee, and currently works as a Chief Product and Technology Officer. This conversation covers what actually drives conference att...