conference

A shift is happening in the way innovation is occurring.

Businesses are moving from closed systems to open, collaborative innovation. Red Hat CEO, Jim Whitehurst, focused on the three major components influencing this shift in his keynote, Open or die?, at the Open Business Conference held in San Francisco this week (April 29-30, 2013). » Read more

One of the ways Obama won the 2012 election was with technology. It wasn’t the only way, but technology offered one thing that feet on the street couldn’t: a force multiplier effect. The technology used during the campaign to accept donations and manage volunteers was based on open source and open standards. Open source helped the campaign accomplish several things. It enabled the team building the technology to create a culture of code, innovate faster, and solve problems the open source way. » Read more

The Open Source Hardware Documentation Jam will be held on April 26-28 in New York.

We always thought the power of open source hardware lies in the ability to build upon others’ work and, when it comes to hardware, good documentation is the key to making this happen. » Read more

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. » Read more

One of the cool projects that OKF France were hacking away on during Open Data Day last weekend was Open Food Facts. It’s a free, open collaborative database of food facts from around the world, which aims to help consumers make better choices about what they put in their body, as well as motivating industry to take more care over the production of food.

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The wiki

The Open Data Day wiki (sans logo, so a little rough around the edges) is now live and ready for action.

The wiki is where organizers can list the city in which they’ll be putting together an event and where interested participants can find local events and let people know that they’ll be attending (to give organizers a sense of numbers) and what projects, workshops, discussions, or other activities they are interested in participating in. » Read more

FOSDEM, held annually in Brussels, Belgium, is a free event for open source communities to meet, share ideas, and collaborate. It offers a mix of focused devrooms and themed main track talks, with no requirement for registration. It has a reputation of being highly developer-focused, this year brought together over 5,000 geeks from around the world.

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I recently came back from the USENIX Large Installation System Administration (LISA) conference held in San Diego, California, and it was an interesting experience. » Read more

TED is a nonprofit that seeks out "ideas worth spreading", showcasing them annually at a conference before a select audience. Thankfully, the best talks are recorded and released for the viewing pleasure of the rest of us, albeit one by one, over an extended period of time. Chris Grames, President and Partner at New Kind, describes waiting for them as, "like a painfully-slowly dripping faucet teases a man dying of thirst."

Now, the folks at TED offer another way for us to quench our desire to hear great business ideas from people who have made their dreams come true—locally organized TedX events. Already this year, 2,013 TedX events have been held around the world, and there are 746 to go. Clearly, what started out as a small group of people talking about technology, entertainment, and design, has grown to encompass a diverse range of topics and industries with millions listening. 

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Open source is about more than the code, it’s about the culture. The open culture that many open source communities embrace is entrenched in organizations like Code for America. It’s obvious as I sit here during the opening day of the Code for America Summit in San Francisco, CA.

Jennifer Pahlka, founder and executive director of Code for America, started off the conference with a call to action, "Beliefs aren't enough, we have to act." » Read more