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News article3 May 2019BrusselsDirectorate-General for Digital Services

First EU-FOSSA Hackathon as it happened

Ready. Set. Hack.

The first external Hackathon of the European Commission was an unquestionable success. It was organized by the EU-FOSSA 2 project, during 6 and 7 April in Brussels. The event brought together over 60 participants from the PHP Symfony community, mostly from Europe but also from Cuba, Morocco, and even Russia.

The purpose of the hackathon was to improve the Symfony framework and components, add new features and fix security issues. All that was accomplished will benefit the European Institutions and open source communities at large.

For many developers, it was the first time they were meeting face to face. It was also the first time the community had so many active developers and members of the core team in the same room. The results immediately followed: “months’ worth of work accomplished in just 2 days” stated Fabien Potencier, Symfony founder. Over 230 issues were addressed or resolved.

 

For two days, developers worked together, connected and shared experiences. Participants were impressed by how much more was achieved simply because they were together, instead of only connected online.

DG Informatics’ Deputy Director-General, Mario Campolargo, addressed the participants during the closing session stating that “You are the proof that innovation happens when people come together.” This first event was a concrete application of the EU-FOSSA 2 project’s objectives. It has set out to support open source projects and to bring developers from the European Institutions closer to open source communities.

This quote from a participant, Yanick Witschi, is a good example of the feedback received:

I’d like to thank all the people in charge within the European Commission’s Department for Informatics (DG DIGIT) for their leap of faith and inviting us to Brussels so we can all meet. I hope we were able to live up to your expectations!

The success of the event was palpable on social media with close to 1000 tweet mentions, close to being the most referred to event in France and Belgium over that weekend.

Here you can find more pictures, tweets, blog posts and results from the EU-FOSSA 2 Symfony Hackthon.

Watch the highlights from the event as it happened

About Symfony

Symfony is a web application framework and a set of open source reusable components, based on the PHP language. It aims to speed up the creation and maintenance of robust web applications in an enterprise context.

It is used at the European Commission to build internal and external web applications of different types: small applications, interactive, workflow-based or collaborative web apps, enterprise web apps, etc.

 

About EU-FOSSA 2

EU-FOSSA 2 will offer a systematic approach for the EU institutions to ensure that widely used critical software can be trusted. The project will help reinforcing the contribution of EU institutions to ensure and maintain integrity and security of key open source software.

Visit EU-FOSSA on Joinup for more information.

Details

Publication date
3 May 2019
Author
Directorate-General for Digital Services
Location
Brussels