ClueCon 15 years ago:

Which came first: the chicken or the egg? ClueCon or FreeSWITCH? In this case, ClueCon takes the cake starting one year before FreeSWITCH was publicly released. ClueCon was founded way back in the the good old days of 2005, by an aspiring team of Asterisk software developers who wanted to push the envelope. Their quest was to gather all of the open source projects into one place. Before ClueCon, there was no conference that covered everything about open source telephony, so their event created an opportunity for many different projects to come together and share what they were up to.

Many people from around the world attended the first ClueCon talking everything telephony and enjoying the chance to bounce crazy ideas off of each other. From these conversations, the team figured out what they needed to do to get FreeSWITCH really going and it was finally presented to the public at the second annual ClueCon! ClueCon really started rolling after this, and it only evolved over time.

The 10(ish) year challenge is all about glow ups and we would be lying if we said everything about our first conference was perfect, but it definitely had a lot of character! The team had never organized a large event before, but they did their best to create an environment that was fun and packed full of industry knowledge. The event wasn’t flashy, but it was certainly a success (if you don’t count the part where police raided the hotel looking for an unrelated guest. Again, we stress: not a guest at ClueCon.) While our conference has certainly dramatically evolved, we still carry that same sense of character from the first conference with us today.

ClueCon Today:

We are so excited to celebrate our 15th ClueCon! Our quindecennial if you will. While we started our focus on open source telephony and VoIP 15 years ago, we’ve now evolved into adding RTC, IoT, maker, SignalWire, and everything else cool about doing development to the discussion. Every year for 15 years, the core members of the FreeSWITCH team still produce and oversee the conference with the original goal in mind: to blend a diverse collection of open source projects, speakers and technology presentations that continue to inspire the way forward.

ClueCon is a place for discovery, development and expansion and our audience has only grown since we started. You’ll find everyone from one man companies figuring out how to make something out of the technology they have, to CEOs and big sponsors that use open source, to venture capitalist groups. That’s the joy of ClueCon: everyone comes together to collaborate. We’ve created a space for developers to work through problems together and to share the projects they are passionate about.

Our attendees have told us our conference is like taking a college course all in one week – learning a lot during the day and socializing a lot in the evening. We love to have FUN and nobody knows developers like we do. We’ve even added a popular hack-a-thon event (the CoderGames) that challenges our attendees to techie and not so techie games.

Even mortal enemies are friends at ClueCon – not that you have any mortal enemies, that would be intense. There are no negative vibes because everyone can find something in common to talk about. We like to think that we’ve carried the original vision of ClueCon throughout the years and only made it better. Of course, we don’t put on the conference for ourselves, we do it for you, so feel free to let us know what you’d love to see done in the future on our slack channel at signalwire.community!

We’re also glad to announce that in our 15 years, no one from our conference has yet to be arrested in a police raid.