Like many other folks involved with Open Source, I will be attending OSCON 2010 in Portland, Oregon this coming week. OSCON is an annual convention for the discussion of free and open source software. It is organized by publisher O'Reilly Media and is held each summer in the United States.
Last time I attended OSCON was in 2008 when DotNetNuke received a bursary for being one of the first open source CMS platforms to provide integration for OpenID. This time around there are no awards; however, I am excited to be involved with a couple of conference sessions…
On Wednesday evening at 8 PM in Room D135, I will be hosting a Birds of a Feather ( BoF ) session, aptly titled Open Source On the Microsoft Platform - Fact Or Fiction?. BoFs provide face to face exposure to those people who are interested in similar projects and concepts. This BoF is for people who want to discuss the past, present, and future of Open Source on the Microsoft platform. This session will provide awareness of the various interoperability programs and services which Microsoft has provided in recent years, and how third parties are taking advantage of them to create passionate open source communities, innovation, and valuable solutions for developers and end-users
On Thursday afternoon at 4:30 PM in Room E143/144, I will be attending a panel sponsored by Microsoft, titled Customer Driven, Vendor Supported Interoperability. Andrew Aitken, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Olliance Group and business advisor to DotNetNuke Corporation will be addressing how interoperability impacts businesses, institutions and government agencies the world over.This session will focus on the value and benefits of customer driven, vendor supported interoperability. A series of short presentations will be followed by an interactive panel discussion to address the direction of interoperability in the changing IT landscape.
I am also looking forward to catching up with the Paula Hunter, the Executive Director for the Codeplex Foundation. Hopefully I can get an update on the progress which the Foundation has made this year ( since stepping off the Board to become an Advisor I regret that I have not had the time to stay as connected as I would have preferred ). The Codeplex Foundation is located in Booth #613.
It will be a busy couple days, but I am really looking forward to the event.