The year 2020 presented new challenges for the Samba eXPerience: For the first time, the 19th international conference on the open source software Samba took place exclusively in digital form from 26th to 28th May 2020. The annual meeting of the international Samba team, which is usually held in Göttingen, was also highly successful as an online event. The sambaXP 2020 was again sponsored by Google and Microsoft.
Thanks to the virtual format, the sambaXP was even able to grow: 150 developers, users, manufacturers and system houses from the samba ecosystem from a total of 23 countries took part in 2020. One of the planning challenges was therefore to set the times of the conference in a sensible way. The setting of a daily frame from 3 p.m. to 9 p.m. CEST made it possible for both speakers and participants alike to follow attentively. A positive side effect also resulted from the use of an online conference system: organizer SerNet will publish videos of the talks for the first time. These are still going through a release process (GDPR) and will go online shortly. The presentation slides are already available.
Feedback on the sambaXP Online Edition has been throughout positive, both on the part of the event organizer and the participants. Only the personal, networking character of the conference was missed. For the future SerNet is therefore working on a format that combines the advantageous online components with the benefits of a meeting on site.
