I recently visited Taipei to attend the conference COSCUP x UbuCon Asia 2026. I gave two talks there along with hosting the Foss United and Floss/fund booth. I’m sharing my experience with the conference, cool stuff that I saw there and some findings we could implement in our conferences.
Day 0 - The Welcome Party
Officially, the conference was from 8th August to 9th August. However, they had a welcome party planned on the 7th. This was simply a gathering of the entire FOSS community. It wasn’t limited to volunteers or speakers; anyone was free to attend. I’ve never before seen such a diverse group of people crammed in a space, talking about FOSS, communities and a lot of things.
It was really fun to meet people from around the world, talking about stuff they’re interested in, or cool projects they’re working on. I met some amazing folks there. This was supposed to be a casual gathering, just for people to get to know each other and be comfortable before the conf. Cool concept honestly, and really well implemented. There was no food served at the party, but we were free to bring our own and share with everyone.
The actual conference
The venue was quite big, with multiple buildings and rooms. There were multiple sessions, booths, and activities happening at the same time. Registration was super smooth too. There was a central registration desk for attendees to arrive and collect their lanyards.
I spent the first hour getting registered, finding the correct room and setting up the booth. Had to borrow a laptop charger from a really nice person from another community booth, because I did not have a universal adapter. But other than that, setting up the booth went smoothly, and soon people started arriving and exploring the different booths.
Throughout the day, I talked to various people from various organizations and communities, who were genuinely interested in the Floss/fund, and also in the activities of FOSS United. I explained the fund, the funding.json and what the fund is trying to achieve as mentioned on the fund website. Overall, I think apart from the sponsor booths, our booth was one of the most popular ones. People were really intrigued by the funding.json concept. I hope at least some communities/projects got the motivation to start using it. Also, a few people also remembered the booth from FOSS Asia.
Apart from the booth, there were talks happening parallelly. The talks were nice. Since some talks were in Chinese and some in English, there was a real-time transcription service they were using, and the talk was transcribed in both English and Chinese. The transcription was shown on the screen with the presentation, in real time. This was really cool to experience.
There was constant movement around the venue. People were moving between buildings, attending sessions, visiting booths, meeting other people, and trying to find their next session.
As the conference went on, we had a really special guest. It was the typhoon Dolphin. What followed was heavy rains and super fast winds for the next two days. This reduced the number of attendees, but overall people who were there were still really active and interested.
I had a talk and a workshop, and both of them went smoothly. It was really amazing to see people listen to my talk, see it transcribed in Chinese, and then ask questions to me in Chinese. There was a volunteer from the COSCUP team there to help me understand the questions. What I noticed was that despite the language barrier, people still took an interest in what I was saying, and noticed enough to ask genuine questions.
The community booths and people had setup tables with quick snacks for people to enjoy. It wasn’t sponsored by the conf but the communities brought their own. It was small stuff like mini chocolates, chips and all, stuff that was their local specialty or something. It was really fun.
Another good thing was the swags. They didn’t have free swags, but it was a fun collection of swags people could choose from and buy either with money or with points they collected by interacting with booths and other things. They had people visit the booths, and scan a QR code to show that they had visited and interacted with the booths. This gave them some points to redeem for the swags.
The best part of it was the people and communities I got to interact with. I met folks from various countries. I met folks from various communities like Canonical, WordPress, Wikimedia, the Open Culture Foundation, Postgres, Mozilla, and several others. It was super fun.
The entire experience was amazing, and really well executed. Apart from the typhoon, everything else was super smooth.