A preview for POSSCON 2013

Members from the open source world will gather in Columbia, South Carolina for the Palmetto Open Source Conference (POSSCON) on March 27-28, 2013.

For anyone looking to score a last minute ticket, the event is sold out. Last year, more than 600 people from 20 states and more than 20 colleges and universities, and 75 business and government organizations, came together in the spirit of open source to share knowledge and grow the open source community.

This will be my third year attending POSSCON and my first year speaking at the event. The keynotes look solid and the rest of the agenda looks fun, inviting, and informative. Let's take a look at what POSSCON has to offer in 2013.

The keynotes include a line-up of speakers from Gartner, The White House, The Linux Foundation, and Mozilla:

• Open source is everywhere in modern IT, Mark Driver, Gartner
• Modern software development: How open source has changed it all, Phil Robb, Linux Foundation
• How open source helped win the 2012 election, Harper Reed, Obama for America 2012
• Is 'open' still enough? Reacting to new threats and old prejudices, Christian Heilmann, Mozilla

For those looking for the technical stuff, there are sessions about networking (the computer kind), cloud (also the computer kind), OpenShift, PHP, MySQL, GitHub, Backbone.js & Grunt, and much more. In addition to sessions, the conference also has a blend of demonstrations, training, birds of a feather, and an open hardware track. Here are a few of the general sessions that look interesting to me:

• How to teach STEM in schools, Lindsay Craig, SparkFun
• Linux and how it grew, Steven Vaughan-Nichols, Journalist
• Inner-sourcing: Using open source methods in corporate IT, Shawn Briscoe, Black Duck Software
• How open source revolutionizes identity, Allan Foster, ForgeRock
• We the People: Open source, open data, Leigh Heyman, Executive Office of the President

I wanted to make a special point about the following sessions on open source licensing and governance models. These can be complicated topics for beginners, but POSSCON has brought in two very knowledgeable experts on these subjects. If you want to learn from some of the best, than these two sessions should be on your list:

• Licensing and governance models, Jim Jagielski, Apache
• The basics of navigating FLOSS licenses, Bradley M. Kuhn, Software Freedom Conservancy

If training is your thing, be on the lookout for the following sessions:

• Open source video and Kaltura, Zohar Babin, Kaltura
• Intro to FreeNAS 8.3, Dru Lavigne, Director of Community Dev., iXsystems
• OpenShift: Code, deploy, and manage your Java app from Eclipse, Grant Shipley, OpenShift PAAS Evangelist, Red Hat

Finally, I'll take a moment to shamelessly plug the two sessions during which I will be speaking. First, I will co-present with Shawn Briscoe from Black Duck Software about The open source why and 10 ways to get started with open source. Then, on the second day of the conference, I have a birds of a feather session about open government and the CityCamp movement called, An open source city, lessons from starting a CityCamp.

If you're attending POSSCON, be sure to share your stories with us.