Just a reminder that the MassTLC Open Source Summit is tomorrow morning! It is $40 online or at the door (and $20 for MassTLC members). A pastery cart, coffee and a bag lunch will be provided (though I do not have the exact details on this). Detailed information and directions are provided below.
One of the trademarks of this event is the level of audience interaction. The talks are not passive events where attendees absorb what is spoken up on some shielded dais. As in the past the event is broken down into three parts (legal, business, and community), plus a keynote. The plan is to have the event recorded, both audio and video, for release in multiple mediums.
Legal
The legal discussion will be on the GPLv3, both the road traveled so far and what the future holds. The process has been extremely open with the community participating in its drafting on an unprecedented level. This panel discussion is a continuation of that effort as well as an examination of that effort.
Business
The corporate panel discussion is not what one would normally expect. There is no real summary description for this panel due to the nature of it. How do you describe an open discussion? I will try. Listening to marketing folks from large companies describe why their open source strategy is the winner is not that interesting or rewarding. The focus here is on the audience and learning from the successes and failures of local companies large and small. Businesses who rely on Open Source are really relying on the communities they foster. The audience is made up of those communities and budding open source based ventures. Here is a chance to discuss the strategies of the day and get a greater understanding for this complex and thriving ecosystem.
Community
For the community section this year we are trying something new. Mark Withington of the Boston PHP group is running a Lightning talk session. These are ~5min presentations by local community members. These can be very exciting. One problem with any conference is that not all topics will interest all people. You also want to have a good range of topics. The purpose of the event is to foster Open Source in Massachusetts. this is done by building relationships and helping connect people. This can be hard for a small event such as ours. Lightning talks offer a great opportunity for this. For the general audience, they are given information dense overviews of topics and events they are interested in. If you are not interested in a topic, just like the local weather, just wait 5min. Presenters, while limited by time, are forced to communicate only the core information they need to get across. The idea is to engage the audience and get them interested in what you have to say. The point is not to answer all the questions an attendee might have for you or your project, but to just get the interested and hungry for more information. After all the talks are completed there will be a break before the keynote and space for attendees to gather and talk to the Lightning Talk presenters. Here is where connections are made and presenters can connect to those who are really interested in what they have to say, and can focus on exactly what people are interested in.
OLPC Keynote
As I have mentioned here and elsewhere, I feel that the software effort behind the OLPC project has been playing second fiddle to the hardware. There has been much attention given to the ‘laptop’, the innovative hardware technology, and some on the ‘child friendly’ interface. Very little has been discussed about the revolutionary new operating system being developed. Did you know the firmware is hardware independent? Did you know that while the kernel is based on Red Hat Fedora, the higher level operating system, including the file system is written in a dynamic interpreted language? Did you know that all you have to do is press a button on the laptop and you get to modify the code for whatever application is currently running? Did you know this is all done securely and using a revolutionary process management system where each process gets its own VM? This is not linux. This is something else entirely, and yes it is 100% open source. I will be handing out the Sugar SDK Live CD which includes a full linux development environment for developing applications for this revolutionary new system.
