"OSCON" entries
OSCON: Standing Out in the Crowd
Kirrily Robert gave the first keynote speech this morning, entitled “Standing Out in the Crowd.” She spoke about the gender imbalance in open source and shared her experiences working on open source projects that have a higher-than-average percentage of women participants. She laid out statistics about the current gender balance of various projects, looked at trends in open source, and closed with a number of tips on how open source projects can get — and keep — more women contributors.
OSCON: Building Belonging (in communities)
I dove right in to OSCON by attending Jono Bacon's "Building Belonging" community talk. Jono, who is the community manager for Ubuntu, started out his presentation by asking what communities can do to build and improve the sense of belonging that people have in their community. After talking a little about what belonging means, he threw out the first concrete…
Tonight's Ignite OSCON Line-Up
Bring the duct-tape, your head will explode. Here's the line-up for tomorrow's Ignite OSCON, starting 7.30pm in Exhibit Hall 3 of the San Jose Convention Center. (It's just before the 8.30pm Google-O'Reilly Open Source Awards) Jesse Vincent (@obra) – Hacking the Kindle The Kindle is not a read-only platform. One intrepid explorer reports back from the frontier. Skud (@skud) -…
How NPR is Embracing Open Source and Open APIs
Daniel Jacobson Will Talk About the NPR Open API at OSCON
News providers, like most content providers, are interested in having their content seen by as many people as possible. But unlike many news organizations, whose primary concern may be monetizing their content, National Public Radio is interested in turning it into a resource for people to use in new and novel ways as well. Daniel Jacobson is in charge making that content available to developers and end users in a wide variety of formats, and has been doing so using an Open API that NPR developed specifically for that purpose. Daniel will talk about how the project is going at OSCON next week, here's a preview of what he'll be talking about.
Making Government Transparent Using R
Danese Cooper thinks it will be an important tool in Open Gov
With Open Source now considered an accepted part of the software industry, some people are starting to wonder if we can’t bring the same degree of openness and innovation into government. Danese Cooper, who is actively involved in the open source community through her work with the Open Source Initiative and Apache, as well as working as an R wonk for Revolution Computing, would love to see the government become more open. Part of that openness is being able to access and interpret the mass of data that the government collects, something Cooper thinks R would be a great tool for. She’ll be talking about R and Open Government at O’Reilly’s Open Source Conference, OSCON.
Sequencing a Genome a Week
Radar Talks to OSCON Speaker David Dooling
The Human Genome Project took X years to fully sequence a single human's genetic information. At Washington University's Genome Center, they can now do one in a week. But when you're generating that much data, just keeping track of it can become a major challenge in itself. David Dooling is in charge of managing the massive output of the Center's herd of gene sequencing machines, and making it available to researchers inside the Center and around the world. He'll be speaking at OSCON, O'Reilly's Open Source Conference, on how he uses open source tools to keep things under control, and he agreed to give us an overview of how the field of genomics is evolving.
Open Source is Infiltrating the Enterprise
Forrester's Jeffrey Hammond Says There's Plenty of it Around, if You Look
There’s a persistent perception that open source software is being ignored in the enterprise, that they fear it and it ends up being more costly to deploy than proprietary solutions. That’s certainly the perception that some major software vendors would like you to have. But it’s Jeffrey Hammond’s job to dispel those perceptions, at least when they aren’t accurate. As an analyst for Forrester Research, Hammond covers the world of software development as well as Web 2.0 and rich internet applications, so he sees how open source is being used on a daily basis. He’ll be speaking at OSCON, O’Reilly’s Open Source Conference, talking about the true cost of using open source, and he gave us a sample of what’s going on in the enterprise at the moment.
Patrick Collison Puts the Squeeze on Wikipedia
How to Cram the Wikipedia onto an 8GB iPhone
Think about Wikipedia, what some consider the most complete general survey of human knowledge we have at the moment. Now imagine squeezing it down to fit comfortably on an 8GB iPhone. Sound daunting? Well, that’s just what Patrick Collison’s iPhone application does. App Store purchasers of Collison’s open source application can browser and search the full text of Wikipedia when stuck in a plane, or trapped in the middle of nowhere (or as defined by AT&T coverage…) Collison will be presenting a talk on how he did it at OSCON, O’Reilly’s Open Source Convention at the end of July, and he spent some time talking to me about it recently.
OSCON 2009 Highlights
OSCON 2009 is just around the corner, this year in San Jose, California. When I spoke at the Silicon Valley Linux Users Group last night, they asked me for a few highlights. It's tough to pick from over 200 sessions, all the best-of-the-best out of 800 submissions (and there were at least 100 more I wish I could have fit…
Nominations For Google-O'Reilly Open Source Awards 2009
The 5th annual Google-O'Reilly Open Source Awards will be hosted at OSCON 2009 in San Jose, CA. The awards recognize individual contributors who have demonstrated exceptional leadership, creativity, and collaboration in the development of Open Source Software. Past recipients for 2005-2008 include Angela Byron, Karl Fogel, Pamela Jones, Gerv Markham, Chris Messina, David Recordon, Doc Searls, and Andrew Tridgell. The…