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

------

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

The Doctoral Consortium and the conference provided a great experience for me to get to know a diversity of research topics conducted on open source. It's interesting to hear people present their work, and very informative to listen to the comments and suggestions from the faculties and the audience. I had an opportunity to share my very initial dissertation idea, and got some great feedback very useful for the conceptualization of the work. This kind of feedback, to be honest, can save a lot of my time "searching in the dark". I was also glad to know a lot of great people.

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.

Been known since birth as Mohammad AlMArzouq
As of late, I find my self forgetting who I am as I stay up at two thirty am trying to finish up the work that will get me to graduate. Work, that you might have guessed by now is related to FLOSS.

Of course the sessions are very interesting when people present such a diversity of topics but also talking to people during the breaks and dinner is very informative and a lot of fun. So as an extension of the DC, talking more about my research and hearing about others' work and how it may connect to mine is really fun. Because the context is the same, it is fairly easy to find some cross-over. I don't experience this with the HCI and CSCW research communities.

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.

Stormy's Talk was mainly about how Open Source Software Changed Things. My notes below are taken quickly and are not edited.

-In the past there were completely different stacks, and now people from different industries work together. People from chip manufacturers, application developers, etc work together.
-OSS also changed the way we teach computer programming.
-The software in the past was free, and the more important thing was to sell hardware.
-Now instead of trying to write a script to solve your problems, you are googling to see if somebody else did this first.

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.