David Pescovitz’s favorite geek confab of the year!
The presenters aren’t usually celebrity types but just supersmart nrrrds making fascinating tech and thinking about the impact of innovation on our lives. I’m really excited to be on the program committee again this year. The Call for Participation is now open and we’re looking for big ideas across a huge spectrum of tech/culture, from materials science and synthetic biology to nomadism and sustainable life.
Read more.
ETech veteran Cory Doctorow’s kind words on this year’s conference and the Call for Proposals:
The call for proposals for O’Reilly Emerging Tech 2009 has just gone up: “Living, Reinvented.” I was involved in every ETech from the first P2PCon in 1999 right up to last year (I’m taking a year or two off while I catch up on fatherhood and book-deadlines), and I have had some of my most mind-blowing, life-altering conversations and experiences at these events, which showcase the leading edge of (often impractical but never boring) experimentation, skunkworks, and passionate development. This year’s theme sounds fantastic, too. Proposals are due Sept 17, and the event is next March 9-12 in San Jose.
David Miller came to OSCON and interviewed Jim Zemlin, Raven Zachary, and Rick Turoczy:
It’s open source time again in Portland: the Open Source Convention, or OSCON, is back in town. Of course, you could argue that every day is open source day in Portland. The inventor of the wiki lives here. So does Linus Torvalds of Linux fame. As do a number of companies based on open source architecture, like the Collaborative Software Initiative.
Web 2.0 Newsradar spreads the word about Al Gore at Web 2.0 Summit by reposting Tim O’Reilly’s announcement.
BuzzTracker says the announcement about Al Gore at Web 2.0 Summit is its most blogged piece on Mr. Gore.
David Pescovitz writes about the terrific speakers scheduled for Web 2.0 Summit:
Our fearless band manager John Battelle is the co-host, along with Tim O’Reilly, of the Web 2.0 Summit, a huge confab where Internet heavyweights talk big vision. Combined, John and Tim know everyone on the Internet (and their brothers) and so they always line up great talkers. They’ve just announced the speaker list for this year’s Web 2.0, to be held November 5-7 in San Francisco. It’s no “insider baseball” Internet conference. Indeed, the big thematic question of Web 2.0 2008 is: “How can we apply the lessons of the Web to the world at large?” Folks like Al Gore, Lance Armstrong, Saul Griffith, Elon Musk, and Michael Pollan will attempt to provide some answers.
Read the rest here.
Tim O’Reilly on the exciting news that Al Gore will join the conversation at Web 2.0 Summit:
As I wrote last month in What Good is Collective Intelligence if it Doesn’t Make Us Smarter?, at this year’s Web 2.0 Summit, we’re focusing on how what we’ve learned from the web over the past decade can be applied to solve the world’s hard problems. That’s why I’m really excited to see that John Battelle has persuaded Al Gore to join us.
One of those hard problems that requires all the intelligence we can throw at is global warming. And there’s no one who deserves as much credit as Al Gore for getting it on our collective radar. Through persistence, vision, and hard work, and a real mastery of the new tools of global media, he made all of us pay attention. His work has been a textbook demonstration of the power of media to change the way people think.
That’s Gore’s continuing focus, with his role at Current TV. He’s also joined Kleiner Perkins as a partner involved in cleantech investing.
When I first saw Gore talk about climate change at the TED conference in early 2006, everyone wanted to know what we could do about it. People are still struggling to answer that question, but it’s clear that technology can play a large role: helping us to monitor and measure the rate of change in crucial environmental variables, creating feedback loops that change behavior at both macro-levels (like carbon markets) and personal levels (like home energy monitoring); creating green data centers and low-power devices; creating new forms of renewable energy generation or storage, new materials that require less energy to create; alternative fuels and vehicles. The list goes on and on. (Reminder: we’re looking for innovative “web meets world” startups for the Web 2.0 Summit Launchpad.)
Of course, global warming is far from the only “web meets world” theme that we’re exploring. The conference will cover everything from the latest trends on the web (the rediscovery of e-commerce as a business model, cloud computing, social networking, mobile applications, and the inevitable platform wars) to politics, global disease detection, personal genomics, private space industry, and even military infotech. Speakers I’m particularly excited to see, in addition to Vice President Gore, include Tony Hsieh (@zappos, for those of you who see him continually on twitter), Elon Musk (who’s got to have the coolest portfolio of investments since retiring from PayPal, with SpaceX, SolarCity, Tesla Motors all under his wing), and Michael Pollan, who’s completely changed the way many of us think about food. Check out the confirmed speaker list, but keep in mind that there are more yet to come as John and I firm up the program.
John Battelle announces a splendid addition to the Web 2.0 Summit:
Those of you following my posts around the theme of this year’s Web 2 Summit already know that we’re expanding the scope of the conference this year, and asking a core question: How can we apply the lessons of the Web to the world at large? From my post outlining the theme:
As we convene the fifth annual Web 2.0 Summit, our world is fraught with problems that engineers might charitably classify as NP hard—from roiling financial markets to global warming, failing healthcare systems to intractable religious wars. In short, it seems as if many of our most complex systems are reaching their limits.
It strikes us that the Web might teach us new ways to address these limits. From harnessing collective intelligence to a bias toward open systems, the Web’s greatest inventions are, at their core, social movements. To that end, we’re expanding our program this year to include leaders in the fields of healthcare, genetics, finance, global business, and yes, even politics.
Increasingly, the leaders of the Internet economy are turning their attention to the world outside our industry. And conversely, the best minds of our generation are turning to the Web for solutions. At the fifth annual Web 2.0 Summit, we’ll endeavor to bring these groups together.
To my mind, no person better exemplifies the merging of these two worlds than former Vice President (and Nobel laureate) Al Gore, the Chairman of Current TV. Gore and CEO Joel Hyatt started Current as “a new breed of media company that works with its young adult audience to create media that informs, enriches and inspires,” by integrating online and offline media, a very Web Meets World endeavor indeed. Readers may recall that Gore recently joined Kleiner Perkins as a partner focused on green issues, as well. And we are very pleased to announce that VP Gore will be joining us at the Web 2 Summit this year.
Others joining VP Gore include Elon Musk, of PayPal, Tesla, SolarCity and SpaceX, Larry Brilliant, the head of the Google.org foundation, and Michael Pollan, author of many wonderful books on our relationship to food, including my favorite: The Botany of Desire. The full lineup is truly wonderful, and we’re still adding speakers.
Requests for invitations can be found here, this is going to be one special event.
Suw Charman Anderson explores this year’s ETech theme and wonders about submitting a proposal. Read more of her thoughts here.
Christian Lupp is really looking forward to his talk at RailsConf Europe:
From Sept. 2nd to Sept. 4th 2008 the Ruby on Rails community will meet at the RailsConf Europe. It’s the third RailsConf in Europe and it will located in Berlin/Germany again. Last year, more than 800 Rails enthusiasts joined the conference - a great developer community event - and always the chance to drink your coffee besides one of the creative minds of the Rails Core team ;-) There is nothing that can replace the face-to-face communication within the community. So, I can warmly recommend joining the conference in Berlin to every Rails developer who is able to get there. And all those, who want to develop elegant web applications and do not work with Ruby on Rails yet - they should join us more than ever.
Read his whole post here.
Tim Bray offers more notes on his OSCON Keynote:
Here are all the missing pieces, should you want to watch it (only 15 minutes, remember); plus a little extra commentary.
RIchard MacManus supports the “Web Meets World” Auction by offering free passes for the best auction item ideas:
This year the Web 2.0 Summit conference (5-7 Nov) is hosting an auction to benefit a few innovative organizations that are solving big problems.
To show our support for this initiative, ReadWriteWeb is running a competition in this post.
From ETech chair Brady Forrest:
ETech’s CFP has launched. The theme this year is Living, Reinvented: The Technology of Abundance and Constraints. To that end I spent time with MITs Scratch Team (changing computer education) and the RoboScooter team (changing transportation). We’re going to explore the following themes.
Esther Schindler came home from OSCON with thoughts on growing the size of the pool in open-source development communities. And it’s all upbeat news.
Michael Dory, Adam Simon, and Scott Varland of Socialbomb presented a tutorial on Arduino hacking at last month’s O’Reilly Open Source Convention:
Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It’s intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments.
In this tutorial, participants will learn how to create devices for sensing and communicating with the physical world using the Arduino platform.
Read the rest of the tutorial.
Sebastopol, CA–Co-presenters O’Reilly Media and Ruby Central have unveiled the program for RailsConf Europe, the official trusted event for the Rails Community in Europe on 2-4 September, 2008, in Berlin, Germany. Organizers have extended early registration until 30 July, offering community members the chance to save up to £150.
“RailsConf Europe is in its third year, and like Rails itself, it’s an established presence but one with energy and real freshness. This year we’ve added some more presentations to the schedule, and we’ve got a great lineup of keynote talks and sessions centering around the Rails core team and both the present and future of Rails,” says program chair David Black. “The presentation schedule is packed with focused, technically informative talks from experts in everything from security to internationalization to deployment, metaprogramming, database and UI engineering–the whole range of Rails activity and interest. The Rails scene, like the Ruby scene, has always been vibrant and rich in Europe, and we’re tapping right into it.”
Our good friend Ricky Montalvo and his crew shot some great footage at OSCON. Check out their coverage and conversations here. Fishsticks?
Andrew Savikas, chair of the O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference, on The Times and Derek Gottfrid’s presentation at OSCON:
But there’s something going on at the Times that probably won’t make it to Silicon Alley Insider, much less the mainstream business press, and it’s something that’s starting to make me think the Times just might succeed in adapting to the changing rules of the media and publishing game (though there will almost certainly be many more casualties before it’s over).
So what’s the Times doing that’s so important? They’re hacking.
Read the rest of the story.
Slashdot on some of OSCON’s greatest hits:
An anonymous reader writes “Infoweek wraps last week’s event with Inside The OSCON 2008 Conference, which pulls together interviews with Mark Shuttleworth, Linux Foundation’s Jim Zemlin, MySQL’s Zach Urlocker and Sam Ramji, who directs Microsoft’s Open Source Lab. Best quotes: ‘We will make a significant attempt to elevate the Linux desktop to the point where it is as good or better than Apple,’ from Shuttleworth; and ‘If I would start a business tomorrow I’d do it in the netbook marketplace. I’d build a dead-simple $200 device that targets sports fans, women over forty,’ from Zemlin.”
Serdar Yegulalp brings all his OSCON coverage together.
We round up our coverage of the open source OSCON 2008 conference. Don’t miss Q&As with Ubuntu’s Mark Shuttleworth and The Linux Foundation’s Jim Zemlin. Check out the photo gallery, too.
See all of Serdar’s terrific coverage here.
Tim O’Reilly asks for, and suggests a few of his own, ideas for Web 2.0 Summit auction items:
We’re looking for suggestions as well as donations. For example, what might O’Reilly donate that would bring a big price for the target charities? For example, how much would you donate to have us organize a mini-foo camp for a company, bringing together cool hackers in the company’s area of interest? (But suggestions are best if you have some kind of angle on actually helping to make them happen.)
Check out the latest suggestions in the comments and read Tim’s entire post here.
SAN FRANCISCO - July 30, 2008 - TechWeb (formerly CMP) and O’Reilly Media,
Inc., co-producers of the annual Web 2.0 Summit, announce the Web Meets
World Auction at Web 2.0 Summit on the evening of Wednesday, November 5,
at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. The first Summit auction illustrates
this year’s theme of applying what we’ve learned from the Web to help
solve our world’s most pressing limits. Keynote speaker Lance Armstrong,
the cancer survivor, seven-time Tour de France winner and founder of the
Lance Armstrong Foundation who recently joined with Demand Media to launch
LIVESTRONG.COM, will autograph a Trek road bike that will be auctioned off
with other priceless items during Web 2.0 Summit’s Web Meets World
Auction. All proceeds from the auction will benefit charity. Complete
information about the Web Meets World Auction can be found at:
http://en.oreilly.com/web2008/public/content/auction.
“In planning for the Web 2.0 Summit event this year, we have been inspired
to look beyond our immediate needs and into a space that transforms limits
into opportunities,” said John Battelle, Web 2.0 Summit’s Program Chair.
“With that in mind, we’ve asked our speakers, including Lance Armstrong
and others, to help us host this auction and provide the Summit community
at least one concrete way to support change.”
The Web 2.0 Summit team will solicit donations, and donation ideas, from
individuals and companies within the community and then choose the 10 most
promising and unique offerings to auction after the conference dinner.
Lance Armstrong, the seven time Tour de France winner and founder of the
Lance Armstrong Foundation and LIVESTRONG.COM, will donate an autographed
bicycle that he signs on-stage during his interview with John Battelle.
All proceeds from the event will benefit three charities, including
WITNESS.org, which uses video and online technologies to open the eyes of
the world to human rights violations.
Members of the Web community can contribute to the success of the Web
Meets World auction by joining the Web 2.0 Summit Facebook community and
suggest which charities should benefit from the auction and what you would
consider a priceless donation. Individuals or companies who would like to
offer auction items should email: auction@techweb.com.
Web 2.0 Summit takes place November 5-7, 2008 at the Palace Hotel in San
Francisco. The event is produced by partners O’Reilly Media, Inc. and
TechWeb and is moderated by John Battelle, Program Chair. Attendance is
limited to maintain an intimate setting and foster dialog among
participants. General attendee registration is by invitation only;
requests for invitations are being accepted through mid-September. Media
credentials are also extended by invitation only.
For more information on Web 2.0 Summit and to apply for an invitation,
please visit:
http://web2summit.com
To read coverage from Summit 2007, please visit:
http://conferences.oreillynet.com/pub/w/62/news.html
To view select video from last year’s Summit, please visit:
http://web2summit.blip.tv/
About TechWeb
TechWeb, the global leader in business technology media, is an innovative
business focused on serving the needs of technology decision-makers and
marketers worldwide. TechWeb produces the most respected and consumed
media brands in the business technology market. Today, more than 13.3
million* business technology professionals actively engage in our
communities created around our global face-to-face events Interop, Web
2.0, Black Hat and VoiceCon; online resources such as the TechWeb Network,
Light Reading, Intelligent Enterprise, InformationWeek.com, bMighty.com,
and The Financial Technology Network; and the market leading,
award-winning InformationWeek, TechNet Magazine, MSDN Magazine, Wall
Street & Technology magazines. TechWeb also provides end-to-end services
ranging from next-generation performance marketing, integrated media,
research, and analyst services. TechWeb is a division of United Business
Media, a global provider of news distribution and specialist information
services with a market capitalization of more than $2.5 billion.
*13.3 million business decision-makers: based on # of monthly connections
About O’Reilly
O’Reilly Media spreads the knowledge of innovators through its books, online services, magazines, and conferences. Since 1978, O’Reilly has been a chronicler and catalyst of leading-edge development, homing in on the technology trends that really matter and spurring their adoption by amplifying “faint signals” from the alpha geeks who are creating the future. An active participant in the technology community, the company has a long history of advocacy, meme-making, and evangelism. For more information, visit: http://oreilly.com.
O’Reilly is a registered trademark of O’Reilly Media, Inc. Other products mentioned may be trademarks of their respective companies.
While he couldn’t attend the conference in person, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has been following the news about OSCON and thinks that OSCON displayed the friendliest things ever seen to come out of Microsoft towards open source.
Gavin Clarke writes, “The Mozilla Public License (MPL) is the latest casualty of Google’s decision to remove open-source licenses from its popular code hosting service.
The search giant has said Google Code is no longer accepting projects licensed under MPL, although existing MPL-licensed code is allowed to stay.”
See the entire article.
Don’t complain about your situation; do something about it.
That’s the gist of what Danese Cooper, senior director of open-source strategies at Intel, said in her keynote at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention here. Cooper said her talk, titled “Why Whinging Doesn’t Work,” was initially written for women, and she gave a version of it at a women’s conference recently. Cooper said she came up with the idea for the talk after receiving an e-mail from Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical, saying, “Can you girls please stop whinging about this?’”
Read the rest of Darryl Taft’s piece here.
Dana Blankenhorn categorizes the OSCON crowd, i.e. tribe, as visioneers, geeks, suits, wannabees, and users in this overview.
At the OSCON open source convention in Portland last week, Neuros CEO Joe Born explained how Linux-based embedded devices will bring open source to the set-top market and the consumer electronics space. He also demonstrated how to build applications for the Neuros OSD, his company’s programmable DVR product.
Read the rest of Ryan Paul’s analysis here.
While all the other “nytimers” are running around having interesting discussions, I thought I’d do a quick blog post.
Yesterday’s OSCON sessions were great overall, but there were a couple that really stood out for me.
Read about the sessions that most interested Nick Thuesen.
Serdar brings us all the way to Friday:
There’s a part of me that thinks Sam Ramji, director of Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT)’s Open Source Lab, has the worst imaginable job at Microsoft. But he doesn’t see it that way: Where other people would see such a position as being crushed between two wholly opposed forces (Microsoft and open source), Sam sees it as a way to build a bridge that didn’t exist before — and maybe to transform Microsoft all the more from within.
Read the whole story
Aside from having one of the niftier names in the industry, Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier has a pretty nifty job, too: He’s the openSUSE Community Manager at Novell (NSDQ: NOVL), where he oversees the folks that help make what will ultimately turn into the next version of SUSE Linux Enterprise. I grabbed a few minutes of his time to follow up on things I’d talked to him about back at theRed Hat (NYSE: RHT) Summit.
Thursday, and the prolific Serdar continues his coverage.
On Wednesday I sat down at OSCON with a slew of people from Sun Microsystems to talk about key parts of their empire, both new and old. First up was Zack Urlocker of MySQL (whom I’d observed at the Monday Participate 08 panel), one of the newest additions to the Sun galaxy, and an acquisition that’s caused a great deal of worry amongst existing MySQL users.
Serdar reaches the middle of OSCON in this Wednesday report.
Let’s rewind a bit. My Monday afternoon at OSCON 2008 was taken up by “Participate 08,” a Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT)-sponsored discussion panel chaired by a whole panoply of folks — including, yes, an open source liaison from Microsoft. The whole thing was neither a “corporate apologia” (as one wag put it from the audience) nor a pile-on where Microsoft got the worst of it. Their approach was only one of a diversity of perspectives, and sometimes not even the most eyebrow-raising.
Serdar Yegulalp continues his OSCON reports.
Mobile computing has become a dominant focus in the open source arena, a theme on prominent display at a major open source technology convention last week.
The O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) in Portland, Ore., highlighted mobile efforts along with Linux, Web computing, and languages. Mention of various mobile efforts abounded, including LiMo (Linux Mobile), Intel’s Moblin, and the Google-backed Android platform.
Read more of Paul Krill’s summary of Mobile at OSCON.
By most estimates, Linux and other open-source operating systems represent about 1 percent of the PC market. But on mobile devices, Linux is growing fast. As of 2007, more than 18 percent of all embedded devices–from cell phones to PDAs to e-book readers–ran a Linux-based OS, while less than 17 percent ran embedded Windows. So it’s no great surprise that this year’s OSCON open-source conference is leading off with a new program focused specifically on mobile gadgets.
Read more of Robert Strohmeyer’s coverage.
Tim O’Reilly’s OSCON keynote encouraged the open-source community to pay attention to three main challenges: Cloud computing, the open programmable Web and open mobile. Another speaker exhorted attendees to get involved in another larger effort.
Read more of Esther Schindler’s report.
Serdar Yegulalp writes, “I’m still sorting through the last bits of my OSCON trip notes, but one striking conversation I had was with Byrne Reese of SixApart about people who violate open source licensing of for-pay editions of OSS apps. Do we sic the open source cops on them?”
Read their answer here.
