Why the builders still meet in person

Why this conversation

Open source is written by people who mostly work apart, across time zones and companies. The projects that agents now run on are built the same way. So why fly two thousand people to one hall? On the second day of AGNTCon + MCPCon Europe in Amsterdam, the host put that question to the person who organises the events: Angela Brown, SVP and General Manager of Events at the Linux Foundation, the home of the Agentic AI Foundation. It is the longest conversation the show recorded that week, and it moves from trust to geopolitics, regulation and the calendar ahead. The rest of the week is in AGNTCon + MCPCon Europe 2026: who we met.

Trust, built face to face

The Linux Foundation’s goal, she says, is to support foundations and open source projects so they succeed, and to build and grow their communities. People have always worked on open source globally, from their own computers, and a great deal gets built that way. But there is no better way to move it forward than face-to-face collaboration. When you build with people you do not know, trust matters. In person you get to know them, hear differing opinions, and have real conversations. She was quick to add that the events are a team effort, not hers alone.

The people in the hall, she points out, are the ones building the agentic stack. The Agentic AI Foundation came together when companies that had built projects decided those projects could do more good in the open. The conference grew from those donations, from the contributors who work on the projects, and from the companies that joined as members. The foundation was only nine months old, and the Linux Foundation had never seen membership grow at that velocity. She does not read it as membership for its own sake. It shows companies investing because they believe building in the open benefits all of them: a proof point that open source works, and can work for AI too.

A global community

She has worked at the Linux Foundation for eighteen and a half years, all of them for the same CEO, Jim Zemlin, through a lot of geopolitical upheaval. Their position, from a policy perspective too, is that “open source is not limited by borders”. It is not a product that one company sends across a frontier. It only works with a global community, and when people set tensions aside to work together, she calls it “an example I wish you could show to some governments”.

That is the thinking behind an event in Nairobi. When the Linux Foundation looked at where to go this year, doing something in Africa came up. International standards matter, and nobody wants one country doing one thing and another doing something else. In countries such as Kenya, and in India, technology is used in ways Europe and North America might not expect: people moved to mobile payments faster, and agentic commerce is a big thing. When the Gates Foundation heard about the event, it wanted to be involved at once, and it is helping to invite governments from across Africa so that they can talk to the people building these systems and see why joining international standards matters. For her, that event is about accessibility, inclusivity and equal access.

Production, compliance and the program office

The host’s own takeaway from the floor was two words: composability and accountability. She agreed those were two of the big themes. At MCP Dev Summit in New York in April, the message was that MCP is in production now, and the question became how to use these tools well. A major MCP release followed in late July. In Europe especially, compliance, governance and security all have to be taken into account by the developers who build and roll these tools out.

The host raised the industrial companies, which want predictability from a technology that is statistical. Her answer looks back a decade. Many companies built open source program offices to manage how they contribute and consume, and to deal with compliance, security and governance. She expects open source AI to land in those same offices rather than in a separate one. She was glad to hear from the host that many badges belonged to traditional industrial groups.

Keeping up is the other problem. AI is moving so fast that every event covers new things, and the news each morning could take hours to read. It is still early days: ChatGPT arrived only about three and a half years before. MCP Dev Summit, started by Obot AI and donated to the Agentic AI Foundation when it formed in December, had about 450 people in London the year before. This event had over 2,000.

Where to find the events

All the events are listed at events.linuxfoundation.org. Next on her calendar were MCP Dev Summit in Toronto, then AGNTCon + MCPCon North America in San Jose on 22 and 23 October, co-located with PyTorch Conference. She described them as layers of one stack: PyTorch for training and models, the Agentic AI Foundation for agents, and KubeCon North America in Salt Lake City a few weeks later for the infrastructure under both. Two and a half weeks after Amsterdam came Open Source Summit Europe in Prague, held every year since 2011, with about 2,300 people expected and the Embedded Linux Conference alongside it.