Open Sorcerers' Apprentices: Notes from Oscom
Registration for the OSCOM2 conference started at 8am yesterday, and given that I was still on UK time I decided to wake up early and walk to the conference center.
My map showed the conference location to be about 2 miles away, which seemed like a nice walk in Berkeley's usual early morning fog. What the map didn't show was that the two mile walk was up a steep hill.
The conference location is a university lecture theater in the Lawrence Science Hall.
There is no separate vendor exhibition, and as a pleasing difference, there are no salesmen present.
Most people are hanging out in T-shirts and jeans, with the organisers wearing multi-coloured hats so they can easily be spotted.
Conversations before the conference focus on SQL, Java, PHP and Perl, and I soon get the impression that most of the attendees are developing a CMS themselves.
With over 50% of CMSs developed in house, these guys represent a significant proportion of the CMS industry, and all of them are looking for open source components they can use in their own CMSs, or a pre-built systems that they can use themselves.
Opening the conference, Michael Wechner of Swiss-based Wyona, said that “the focus in on collaboration between different content management systems. We want people to meet together and exchange ideas.”
Among familiar OS faces Paul Everitt - Founder of Zope Corporation and now member of Zope Europe, and Lon Boonen - Head of q42 and author of Xopus XML editor.
The conference itself is made up by different presentations from the available open source projects and also special sessions to facilitate “Birds of a Feather” discussions between people with similar problems and challenges.
Bridging the digital divide
Charles Nesson, Professor of Law at Harvard Business School, opened the conference with a discussion of the importance of open source software to society. Prof. Nesson believes that open source software will be of key importance in ensuring the the Internet does not drive a greater wedge between rich and poor, and Harvard is involved in a number of projects to develop open source software.
The plan is for these packages to be propagated throughout the educational community, but the biggest challenge is in providing support to those who want to roll-out open code. “If you think open source is approaching a tipping point with the people who make decisions,” he says, “then put yourself in the position of someone with a problem who needs someone to call.”
He has been working with the Jamaican government on a pilot project to provide Internet technologies for education within their prison service, and invited OSCOM as an organisation to participate in this work. Although most attendees at the conference are developers, Prof Nesson hopes that the group will consider the issues of support and work out ways that they could work with the Jamaican government to provide the level of support that is needed for this work.
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