Three hundred twenty-one developers, students and technology professionals converged on Universidad Libre in Barranquilla, Colombia, for the first-ever openSUSE America Summit.

It was a two-day event held at Universidad Libre’s campuses that wrapped up on May 1 with calls to expand open-source culture and contribution across the region.

A capture the flag competition added a hands-on cybersecurity dimension to the summit, challenging participants to test their offensive and defensive skills in a live environment. The exercise drew significant interest from students and IT professionals alike.

The conference drew presenters from across the globe, which reflects the international reach of the open-source community. Speakers representing Colombia, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, India, the United Kingdom, Germany and the United States addressed topics ranging from cybersecurity and cloud infrastructure to machine learning and community development.

Luis Delascar of Colombia opened Day 2 with a presentation on Kuná Red, an offline-first, open-source mesh networking solution designed to enable communication in rural and underserved regions lacking reliable internet or cellular infrastructure. Diego Córdoba of Argentina delivered a deep dive into Netfilter and firewall architecture in openSUSE using nftables, while compatriot Andrea Navarro, also from Argentina, addressed the use of Jupyter notebooks in educational settings as an alternative to commercial cloud platforms.

Patrick Fitzgerald made the case for Linux migration in an update talk titled about migrating from Windows to Linux citing growing concerns around data sovereignty, tariffs, and unreliable international partnerships as compelling reasons for individuals and organizations to move to Linux.

Ram Mohan Rao Chukka and Shibi Ramachandran, both from India, presented two sessions; one on improving end-to-end testing using Kuttl to reduce broken builds, and another on intelligent drift detection and auto-remediation in ArgoCD for enterprise Kubernetes environments.

Walddys Dorrejo of the Dominican Republic, an openSUSE moderator, presented on unified observability and security using Wazuh. Gabriel Bazzotti of Brazil introduced Git-based packaging for openSUSE and Anuar Harb of Mexico spoke about open-source infrastructure as the foundation for connected digital ecosystems in emerging regions.

Colombian speakers were featured prominently throughout the program. Jorge Lambrano presented a full machine learning workflow. Jorge Aguilar addressed building modern, robust open-source data platforms for demanding analytics workloads. Jesuse Bossa explored the historical and philosophical purpose of engineering and Deiner Bello showcased VisitChocó, an interactive tourism platform built with React, TypeScript and geospatial data promoting the Colombian department of Chocó. Integration of Weblate to enable community-driven translations and expand the platform’s reach to broader audiences across Latin America and beyond is being considered.

Johannes Segitz delivered two sessions. His talk about the current AI landscape and how LLMs are reshaping how people code, patch and package software was a crowd pleaser.

Organized by sponsorship lead Astian Inc., which the company behind the Midori light-weight Web Browser along with a network of local support from LinuxBQ and Red Team Barranquilla, Barranquilla’s community of free and open-source software enthusiasts organized and ran the summt April 29 through May 1.

Having the event at two campuses, Universidad Libre’s Central Campus on April 29 and North Campus on April 30, was a natural fit for the open-source event. Attendees included speakers, IT professionals and students from university had hours of discussions about openSUSE and the broader open-source ecosystem.

The event was made possible with support from SUSE and the Geeko Foundation, both of which help to champion growth of the openSUSE Project and the global open-source community.

The choice of Barranquilla as host city may prove to be more than symbolic. Organizers and attendees have begun discussing the possibility of transforming the openSUSE America Summit into a recurring, traveling event modeled after the openSUSE.Asia Summit, which rotates among countries throughout Asia. Each host nation contributes its own cultural identity and local community to the gathering.

Colombia, with its growing technology sector, strong university ecosystem and passionate open-source community, make a compelling case as a starting point and center of gravity for future events. The LinuxBQ community’s enthusiasm and the active participation of Universidad Libre students signal that the conditions for a sustainable, grassroots open-source movement in the region are already in place. If the model takes hold, future editions of the summit could travel to other nations across the Americas and the Caribbean, amplifying the voices of tech leaders throughout the region and building a collective, traveling community of experts much as the Asia Summit has done across that continent.

A community barbecue on May 1 brought speakers and volunteers together to close out the event. Sessions were livestreamed and are available for viewing on the LinuxBQ YouTube channel.

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