FSOSS 07 - Day 2

Well, day 2 is over now. I must say this was truly a spectacular event. Many thanks and gratitude go out to all the efforts of Seneca staff, students, speakers and volunteers that made this even possible. I will definitely be attending next year. This event has only intensified my desire and passion for Open Source.

As with yesterday, the talks were divided into 4 tracks. Since I can only be in one place at once (I know...excuses!), I was able to attend 5 talks.

The first talk I went to today was a about using DHTML (among other technologies) to create open source, accessible, and rich internet applications. This talk was given by two of the accessibility architects for the Adaptive Technology Resource Centre at the University of Toronto, David Bolter and Simon Bates. I found this talk, and the accompanied demo, to be very interesting. It was pretty cool to see a dynamic menu on a web page being created by the click of a button (or key press) and witnessing a screen reader application effectively interacting with the dynamic menu control. The personal information management demo they provided, based on the DoJo Toolkit, was pretty cool to see as well (drag + drop, animated tree views, tabbed information, inline rich text editing, etc).

The second talk I attended was about the OpenOffice.org community. This talk was interesting because I was able to draw on my experience with Mozilla. Many of the challenges OpenOffice.org is facing in their community, and many of the areas of need that exist for them exist for Mozilla as well. In fact, I suspect, these are parallels that are reflected in many of the open source communities out there and are the needs of the Open Source community as a whole. It was reassuring to hear Louis Suarez-Potts, Community Manager and Chair of the Community Council for OpenOffice.org, talk about the importance of QA. From the outside looking in, I get the feeling that QA folks are the unsung heroes of the software industry. Having been on the inside however, I think we are okay with that; not that I can speak for everyone.

The third talk I attended was a very thought provoking and mind opening experience. It was a talk conducted by Jesse Hirsh, Canadian Internet Evangelist at large, about the "problems" with Open Source. Now this was not a negative talk at all; it was not about why closed source is better than open source or why open source is better than closed source. This was about what needs to be done to extend open source beyond the confines and barriers of the community. I really enjoyed this talk. If you watch any of the video clips on the FSOSS website (see below), watch this one. I won't spoil it for you.

Over the lunch hour, most of us took part in a conversational exercise put on by David Eavesand Mark Surman from the Shuttleworth Foundation. I really enjoyed this exercise. It started with everyone getting in a big circle and introducing ourselves by first name and a colour that described our mood at that point. We did this in turn until everyone had introduced themselves to the group. We then proceeded with the meat of the exercise. There was a line taped down the middle of the room. One end with a 'Y', the other with an 'N'. Each end represented how strongly ones opinions might be for or against an idea given to the group by David. People were asked to stand wherever on the line they personally felt about the idea. Then they were asked to explain why, which resulted in people moving up and down the line; thus, explaining why they moved. This was a really interesting activity in conversation, collaboration, and the exchange of ideas. After this exercise, the talks recommenced.

The fourth talk I attended was given by Bryan Kirschner, Director of Platform Community Strategy at Microsoft. This talk was Microsoft's community and Open Source initiatives. It highlighted some of the technologies that Microsoft is developing (ie. Silverlight) and some of their Open Source initiatives (ie. SharedSource). I found this talk fairly interesting. It was cool to see that Microsoft was making an attempt to reach out to Open Source. I am not 100% convinced that they are well intentioned or whether they are just trying to harness the power of Open Source to minimize profit losses in the face of competition. I do not like to judge a book by it's cover, so I will take this with a grain of salt and see how this plays out.

The fifth talk I attended was scheduled to be a talk by Marcus Bornfreund, Co-director of Creative Commons Canada about Creative Commons and the public domain. Unforunately, Marcus could not make it and had to cancel his talk. Fortunately, one of the FSOSS attendees had been doing research into copyrights and licenscing in an effort to improve the current system. He volunteered to give us a talk and open discussion surrounding these issues. It went real well, considering the impromptu nature of this talk, and actually stimulated quite a bit of honest and open discussion.

This led into the final keynote of the event conducted by Dirk Riehle, Lead of the Open Source Research Group at SAP Labs. While I enjoyed Bob Young's keynote yesterday on a much more personal level, I found Dirk's keynote to be very informative. He talked about open source economics from the perspective of the stakeholder. It definitely gave me another window into the Open Source community.

I really enjoyed this entire event, even if it did mean getting up for 8:15am both days on my week off. I hope I can participate in an event like this again sometime soon.

I have added more pictures from today's talks. Feel free to check them out here. You can also see them using the fsoss2007 flickr feed posted yesterday.

All of the talks are online and available here. I have proposed to David Humphrey that we put these videos onto DVD format so that we can distribute the talks to folks who may benefit from them that do not want to sit through a lengthy download process. Some of the Mozilla folks that were unable to attend come to mind. Please feel free to comment to this post if you think this might be something of interest.

I would again like to extend a sincere thank you out to everyone who made this event possible. I cannot wait until FSOSS 08.