To remind: OSCON will be August 1-5 in Portland, OR. http://conferences.oreillynet.com/os2005/
It is moving to the Oregon Convention Center, a much (MUCH) larger venue with significantly larger rooms for all tracks. No more being banished to the third floor slums!
As I have mentioned earlier the possibility of having a mod_perl track is back. But it'll only become true, if you submit enough talks. We want to build an interesting and a complete mod_perl track. So please read on.
This year the OSCon is done in a different way. The theme is "The
New Paradigm", and we're planning to feature projects and case studies
that reflect the changes Tim describes in his "New Open Source
Paradigm" paper <http://tim.oreilly.com/opensource/paradigmshift_0504.html>. In short,
the trends he identifies are:
* an open source system commoditizes that area of the software market,
enabling people to build things on top of it and charge for it. His
example is Linux enabling Google.
* network-enabled collaboration, both in the form of Rendezvous-like
local services and in the form of data services like Amazon
reviews/recommendations and eBay (where the value's not in the auction
software, but in the userbase and the data they're contributed). Tim's
phrase for the data services is "architecture of
participation"--they're designed to involve users and the users' data,
rather than the old "service provider provides all the data, users
passively consume".
* software customizability (software as a service). The old model of
software as a static product that customers pay for is gone.
Software's constantly revised (eBay tweaks their web site on a near
weekly schedule), and you don't own the software you use it as a
service.
Not every interesting topic is covered by this theme, of course--we'll
still want other talks, without having to try and force them into this framework. But ideally there should be a core of mod_perl talks that address this theme. For example:
* case studies: how a site implemented some aspect of the architecture of participation, how someone's using the commodity open source software to build a new and interesting layer on top that wasn't possible before, how a flexible tool made DIY-IT possible
* tools: tools to revise web sites, tools to monitor web site effectiveness, tools to implement recommendations, your system's Rendezvous library and cool applications built on top of it, distributed authentication/trust
We want to be able to point (in marketing and in keynotes) to a lot of talks and say "look at how open source is making innovation possible, look how it's leading this move to a new model of application development". Basically, it's about building up a coherent showcase of technology and case studies so that attendees can take the ideas and techniques in talks and tutorials and use them in their day-to-day jobs. "What did you learn at OSCON?" "I know how to speed up our site revisions, I have great ideas for how we can get our users to contribute to our site, I found another open source product we can use to get rid of a proprietary one and it will let us ...."
Presentations should be 45 or 90 minutes long (+panels), tutorials -- 3 or 6 hours.
Proposals are due on Feb 13, so don't procrastine and submit your proposals now: http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/os2005/create/e_sess
Just like Perrin did you are more than welcome to submit your ideas to the list first, and get some feedback from the others.
-- __________________________________________________________________ Stas Bekman JAm_pH ------> Just Another mod_perl Hacker http://stason.org/ mod_perl Guide ---> http://perl.apache.org mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://use.perl.org http://apacheweek.com http://modperlbook.org http://apache.org http://ticketmaster.com
