6/4/09 - Day 1

Session 1 - Governance of OSS Projects (panel)

Francesco Bolici

Governance is usually understood as management. It's about accountability and eliminating problems with principal-agent from economics. In OSS, this can help with resource allocation, coordination.

OSS 2009 DC 5/3/2009

Proceedings at http://www.ua.ac.be/main.aspx?c=kris.ven&n=71197

Morning session: Firm involvement in OSS, innovation and economic issues

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1. Juho Lindman - OSS Changes and Software Production Models

RQ: How openness changes software production models? IV - openness; DV - software production models (SPM)

SPMs - "mythical" OSS, inner source, shared source, collaboration w/ OSS communities

IFIP 2.13 business meeting (35 people, 4 women)

Giancarlo Succi - Have to finalize organizational documents in the near future. Investigating higher level of PhD student involvement in the WG 2.13 - thinking about a dissertation award for next year's PhD Consortium.

Stormy Peters: Open source software is changing the way work gets done

Tools make a big difference - particularly with respect to transparency and archival retention. OSS allows us to stop reinventing the wheel.

Keynote address by Brian Behlendorf on 5 June 2009. Brian is a co-founder of the ASF, co-creator of CollabNet, and involved in the Mozilla Foundation, among others. He's now active in Washington, working to help the government understand OSS.

This morning there was an informal breakfast for the women at the conference, and supporting male friends, of course. It was a really nice opportunity to meet some of the other women at the conference, and it seems that there are a lot more women here this year than last. In 2008, I counted about 10% female attendance in any given session, but at yesterday's doctoral consortium, 28% of the attendees were women. It was really encouraging. Not that I mind being a minority in the field, but being the only female student was a bit startling to me last year.

The OSS 2009 doctoral consortium was really fantastic. Most students that I talked to thought this was the best consortium that we've experienced, in terms of being really developmentally valuable. I suspect that this is because of the shared context, which does far more to promote useful dialog than any kind of disciplinary commonality. Instead of wasting a bunch of time explaining what FLOSS is and why it's interesting, we can all just cut to the chase and talk about the interesting stuff - and everyone knows what you're talking about, so they can actually provide useful feedback.

I'm preparing for the trip to Sweden for the 5th International Conference on Open Source Systems in a couple of days by making some tweaks to the FLOSShub website. The newest improvements include updated profiles and viewing permissions, and the addition of a blog entry node type for registered users. I plan to use the blogging functionality on the FLOSShub site for my OSS2009 trip report contents; hopefully others will follow suit.