Lars pointed out to me this article by Jay Lyman of NewsForge. I didn’t even know that Jay made the trip let alone that he was on one of my tours.
Oh, and when I said “the most important racks in open source” I actually had tilted my head back and thrown my arms up in sarcasm (I suppose in the way that Willy Wonka does). In any case, it was a great article and I’ve finally got an idea for my halloween costume (hint: its not Charlie).
GOSCON kicked off in earnest today. Our original hopes were to get about 100 attendees; by this morning we had over 200. We have completely exceeded our expectations and the conference is going really well.
The conference was kicked off by Congressman Wu and then a great talk by Tom Rabon from Red Hat.
I just can’t describe how excited I am about how GOSCON is going. Life is good!
GOSCON is only two days away and our months of preparation are finally paying off.
I’m really excited about GOSCON for a variety of reasons. For one, I think we’ve brought together a great group of speakers as well as attendees. This will be a great mix of 150+ people from 15 states and 3 countries to hear about open source in the public sector. I can’t believe the energy and excitement we’ve received leading up to this conference; so far it has completely exceeded our wildest expectations.
What I’m really excited about are the facilitated sessions. The facilitated sessions will be a couple of hours of focused discussions between like minded groups (say Corrections or Human Services) to really drill down on possible projects and then hopefully lay a roadmap for the execution of those projects. Taking cues from projects like Sakai and Kuali we hope to help these groups define projects and then get the ball rolling on them.
Most of all, I like conferences for the networking opportunities. I think GOSCON will be no different; its great to hear the speakers give their talks but its really great to connect with people who are doing the same things as you. It never hurts to have a person you can contact or a network to lean on in times of need.
More to follow here on GOSCON.