FOSSCON began as an idea by Christel Dahlskjaer (of freenode, Gentoo, ReactOS, Irssi... and others) for a new breed of conference which, while maintaining the usual conference atmosphere, harnesses the collaborative spirit of the FOSS community to produce a conference that wasn't profoundly different, but was profoundly more useful. After a time, she started talking about her idea with her friends and her contacts... her idea slowly spread about and people started asking Christel when she was going to start the conference. Not known for disappointing people Christel soon announced her intentions to pursue the idea. She did what any network operator on an IRC network would do, she opened an IRC channel and invited some folks into it... and thus FOSSCON was born!

How exactly did a conference spring up out of thin air and turn into an international project essentially overnight? Well, you'd have to ask Christel... I'm just writing the website content. But this is exactly how almost all FOSS projects get started, with a small idea that suddenly explodes. The focus of FOSSCON is that very period between the birth of a project and its explosion. Part of this is people, the idea of FOSSCON is to take people that normally interact only over e-mail, IRC and other long-distance communication technologies and put them all together in a room to make explosions. We support making little ideas into big ideas.

FOSSCON is a conference by the Peer-Directed Projects Center (PDPC), the 501(c)3 not-for-profit organisation that brings you freenode, a IRC network providing discussion facilities for the Free and Open Source Software communities, not-for-profit organizations and other related communities or organizations.

If you want to know more you could do worse than meet the team!