FOSSCon Recap

The first FOSScon Northeast was attended by a dedicated group of fifty enthusiasts this Saturday at the Rochester Institute of Technology in Henrietta NY, some coming from as far as Detroit to be immersed in a day of open source brouhaha. The Free Open Source Software (FOSS) convention included three tracks – Education, Business, and Home – along with two workshop tracks. The day also included Birds of a Feature sessions (special interest groups), and a round of lightening talks, where people gave a five-minute presentation on some FOSS topic.

My colleague Tom Patros and I lead a Drupal Kickstart workshop. We ran into projector problems, but the group was small enough that we were able to run the workshop up close and personal. I lead another talk later in the day entitled Open Source Secret Sauce. The decks for both talks are up on SlideShare.

In preparing for the Kickstart, we came across a couple of interesting\ cloud-based Drupal hosts. The DrupalCafe offers a free stock Drupal 6 site that is easy to setup and administer. The site does not allow you to install your own themes or modules, but certain extensions can be added on request. Another great starter site is the DreamHostApp. At this site, you can automatically setup a Drupal site, as well as Wordpress, PHPBBS, Zen, and Google Apps site, all in one click. If you ever wanted to take any or all of these “best of breed” products for a test-drive, DreamHost is your ticket to ride.

Meanwhile, FOSSCon One did suffer from the usual number of issues for a first-time conference. The website lacked detail. An overabundance of tracks and workshops lead to holding sessions in separate buildings. The lunch sponsor fell through, so attendees were left to fend for themselves. The tracks lacked a proctor to distribute and collect evaluations or to prompt speakers at the end of their sessions. But we all made the best of it, and many talks turned into intimate dialogs between people with a deep commitment to open source products.

One great takeaway for me was the notion of using Drupal for professional certification exams. The session leader had started with Moodle and then added Drupal. Since then the Drupal polls and rules modules came out, which together could make Drupal an excellent platform for certification exams.

In another session, my friend Chaz Profit highlighted the trend for open courseware. The prime example is MIT’s OCW site, which now has the materials for over 1900 courses online. The courseware includes lecture notes, sample exams and solutions, and even video lectures. Following MIT’s lead, more and more professors are developing an open and collaborative attitude toward sharing syllabi.

I also ran into Onno Kluyt, former lead of Sun’s Java Community Process (JCP). Onno is now living here in Webster NY, with his own software consulting practice. Afterwards, we caught up at Quinby’s, recounting stories of the dynamics between Sun and the Apache Software Foundation. The ASF hosts about fifty headstrong Java projects, which created some “interesting times” for Sun. (And now Oracle.)

Already plans are underway for FOSSCon 2011, and you can count me in. If you’d like to help out or stay in touch, like the Facebook. Whether you made it out this year or not, there is also an exit survey online.