Late, but I thought it was worth recording what I did on the final day of EuroOSCON.
As always, we started with the keynotes. Marc Heglund talked about privacy issues and the possibility of an “open data” movement. David Heinemeier Hansson talked about the secrets of Ruby on Rails and MySQL’s Kaj Arnö showed us his holiday snaps. Then Luis Casas Luengo gave a very impressive talk on how one area of Portugual is making great use of Open Source Software in education.
The morning’s final keynote was Damian Conway speaking about “Maximizing Non-stakeholder Buy-in by Leveraging Depatented Generic Information Transfer Protocols”. I don’t want to give too much away about this talk, but if you ever get the chance go and see it. You won’t regret it.
After the coffee break I went to see Roger Margoulas talking about Open Source Data Warehouses. Roger builds data warehouses for O’Reilly (I had seen some of his tools in another talk on Tuesday) and he had some really interesting things to say on the subject. Nice to see that in one of his examples he used the Template Toolkit to build an SQL query.
Talks were running a bit late, so I had to rush off to Jouke Visser’s talk about pVoice. I’ve known Jouke for many years and pVoice is a great project which uses Open Source Software to help disabled people.
After lunch I decided on another slightly non-techy talk. Stef Magdalinski is always an entertaining speaker so I decided to go and see him talking about “open sourcing everything”. He was basically looking at a number of knowledge areas and discussing which ones might be amenable to being distributed using a model like Wikipedia.
Then I went to see Johan Vromans talking about his Template Toolkit add-on called TT2Site. This is a simple way to build it web sites using the Template Toolkit. It’s a far simpler approach that the one we talk about in the Badger book. It might be useful if you have a small site to build or maintain.
After another break the conference wound up with Cory Doctorow of the Electronic Freedom Foundation talking about what the European Broadcast Flag plans could mean for the sharing of information. It’s a frightening prospect.
So the conference ended. I stood around in the corridor for a while talking to various people before heading back to my hotel. In the evening, the Amsterdam Perl Mongers had organised a special meeting so a number of us went off to that. Much fun had by all.
All in all a great conference. It’s been a while since I’ve been to a OSCON and I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed them. This was a bit of an experiment for O’Reilly and I hope they think it was a success and organise another one next year.
Thanks to Nat, Gina and all of the conference team for organising.