Open Source Bridge Conference
June 18th, 2009
Open Source Bridge Conference
I’m in Portland today and will be speaking at The Open Source Bridge conference later this morning. I was delighted to see when browsing the agenda over breakfast that close to 30% of the speakers at this event are female, and the topics they’re talking about run the gamut from seriously technical sessions, to community and business development. The session I’ll be delivering later today relates to my last blog topic – leveraging open source to enable innovation in this tough economy.
This morning’s first keynote speaker is the Mayor of Portland, Sam Adams. Mayor Adams is talking about the challenges he has faced in implementing open source in city government. He also stated his aspirations to “out-open-source” his counterpart in Vancouver, BC, who has stated goals around the use of open source in city government. The second keynote of the morning is being delivered by Ward Cunningham, the inventor of the wiki, and he is talking about agile software development which is a topic I find fascinating given the dysfunctional nature of software development.
I always find that the excitement at open source community events is contagious and this is evidenced by the fact that there’s a hacker lounge open 24 hours a day at the conference hotel. I stopped by in the wee hours of this morning and was amazed to see how much work and networking was taking place. This is the inaugural Open Source Bridge Conference and its an event that I’ll definitely plan to attend next year.
June 18th, 2009 at 11:21 pm
So is the idea that we should code-sprint 24 hours for two days? We would do more and not need bedrooms – just more deodorant!