Thursday, October 25, 2007

Up Next, Free Software and Open Source Symposium

Free Software and Open Source Symposium
I meant to get this post out much earlier than the night before the event but I think it will still be useful as all of the symposium content is recorded and available online for free from the FSOSS site. (You can check out last year's talks now, including my presentation about Ajax toolkits.)

Up next for me is the Free Software and Open Source Symposium (FSOSS) at Seneca College running from Oct. 26-27. This will be my third year at this event and the first year the event will span two days. This is another event I've found to have very high quality presentations and a lot of good people from various backgrounds. In fact FSOSS is sponsored by, among others, Mozilla, BMO Bank of Montreal, Novell, Seneca College, and Apple.

Here's my agenda for this two day event:

Thursday
9-10 Usability Anonymous: A 12 Step Program for Better User Experiences
I've really gotten into user experience and how I can improve it in my products. I'm interested to see what David and Jay's 12 step program is after reading book like The Inmates Are Running the Asylum and User Interface Design for Programmers.

10-11 Facebook's Thrift: Scalable Cross-Language Development
This is a talk about some of the technology that supports the Facebook platform. I really don't know anything about Facebook from a technical perspective and this is the first opportunity I've had to hear directly from the dev team.

11-12 Product and User Experience Design in Open Communities
Amazingly I've never seen Mike present. Although I'm interested in the topic I'm going to his talk to see if he's as funny in front of a room of people as he is in person. (My bet's on yes.)

1-2 Welcome To The Jungle: A Field Guide To Enterprise Computing
Read the abstract for this talk. It just seems like it's going to be fun.

2-3 Open Commercial Development
This is the talk I'm giving with Jeff Liu. Our talks the last couple years have been on Open technologies (Eclipse WTP and Ajax toolkits) so this is a bit of a change for us.

3-4 Keynote: Applying Open Source Concepts to Non-software Industries

Friday
9-10 Accessible Rich Internet Applications
This is real concern as RIAs break many of the existing solutions for accessibility. I'm currently building an RIA so I think this will be a useful talk.

10-11 Shifting the Focus: OpenOffice.org 3.0
IBM recently announced that it will collaborate on OpenOffice. Think I'll check out what's new and upcoming.

11-12 Open Source in the Telephony Market
Asterisk is pretty cool. My brother-in-law uses it to power the telephone system for his small business (RentMagic) and I've been meaning to set up a test box for a while to play with this Open Source telephony application.

1-2 Community as A Core Competency: Microsoft and Open Source
Although I've been disapointed by other MS talks at Open Source conferences this one again looks interesting and so I'm holding out hope.

2-3 A Linux Desktop on Every PC
Marcel is a great speaker. (I've seen him twice at this event.) I'm looking forward to what I'm sure will be an energetic talk.

3-4 Keynote: Open Source Economics: Stakeholder Perspectives

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