POSSCON offers a microcosm of IT for all levels of open source interest

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Preparing for my first open source conference

Opensource.com

It was my great pleasure to attend POSSCON 2011 this year. I had the opportunity to do a keynote, a panel discussion, and a technical talk, wearing the hats of both developer as well as "FOSS expert." And that dual-hat nature defines the conference itself quite well. Imagine if OSCON and OSBC had a baby: its name would be POSSCON.

The audience consisted of students, CIO/CTO-level executives, active developers (of both closed and open source codebases), and various levels of academia. Basically, the attendees were a microcosm of IT. And no matter their knowledge of open source, they were there to learn more.

For those of us within the FOSS community, it may appear that the story of open source has shown itself to be a huge success, but the truth is that there is so much more to be told. Conferences such as POSSCON are those types of events where you are not so much preaching to the choir, as the old saying goes, but are instead spinning a tale that is new and wonderful to an eager audience. This sort of outreach, similar to that done by opensource.com, is as vital and as needed as ever.

Two areas where open source is making significant inroads is within government as well as the healthcare communities. Both were well represented at POSSCON; in fact, there was an extremely productive birds of a feather (BOF) session one evening regarding how open source, and the methodologies thereof, can make significant contributions to cancer research. The impact of open source continues to grow.

 

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Jim is a well known and acknowledged expert and visionary in Open Source, an accomplished coder, and frequent engaging presenter on all things Open, Web and Cloud related.

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I had the privilege of attending POSSCON as a speaker this year in the heatlth care track along with Dr. Sam Bowen. We presented the history and progress of OpenEMR, a key opensource EHR project coordinated by OEMR.org. The event was, indeed, a different sort of animal. More about how to use, leverage AND contribute to FOSS outside of geekdom, than the usual. The excitement level was high and there was still plenty of geeky code and hardware things to talk about! A great job all around.

I added a link to Jim's keynote in the article or you can check out the videos that POSSCON posted here: http://www.posscon.org/jim-jagielski-a/

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