The 12th edition of O’Reilly OSCON (Open Source Conference) took place from 19 – 23 July in Portland, USA. In its first few years OSCON’s main goal was to help big companies realise the value of open source. Since that dream has become a reality, OSCON now focuses on defining, maintaining, and extending the identity of what it means to be open source. It’s also an excellent forum for discussing what future possibilities lie ahead.
OSCON is usually organized as following: The first 2 days of the conference are made up of tutorials and summits. Tutorials last 3,5 hours and feature 2 different themes each day. For summits, you usually have 2 different topics to choose from (this year they were cloud computing and scala) and it lasts a whole day.
For the last 3 days there are 40 minute sessions happening simultaneously in 13 different rooms. In addition, the first hour of the day is filled with keynotes of 10 minutes each. You don’t have to attend both tutorials/summits and sessions as you can choose what you want to do when registering. Themes covered by the sessions include: business, cloud computing, community, databases, education, gvernment, health, java, mobile, perl, PHP, Python, Ruby and tools & techniques. And I won’t even talk about the unofficial activities.
I decided to go to OSCON this year for many reasons. Firstly the variety of subjects was really impressive. I have never seen a conference with so many quality sessions happening at the same time with such well known speakers as Chris DiBona, Sebastian Bergmann and Tim Bray. Sessions were really exciting, specially the ones talking about mobile development and javascript programming. And, last but not least, I have always been found of open source in general. I can honestly say that the conference definitely delivers – it was the best conference I’ve been to so far.
As always, there is some room for improvement. Simple things like indicating level of dificulty in sessions and tutorials. Some rooms were too small for sessions and lunch(!), but nothing too critical. I would recommend it to anyone I know and would be really happy to go back again.
Welcome
Board
Exibitors
Badges
Conference Website: http://www.oscon.com/
Slides from sessions and tutorials this year: http://www.oscon.com/oscon2010/public/schedule/proceedings
Photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/oreillyconf/sets/72157624428101453/
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