ja_mageia

Last Tuesday, September19th, I attended the 2006 O'Reilly European Open Source Convention (OSCON) in Brussels, Belgium. Unfortunately, due to some other preoccupations, I found out about this at the last minute but I did not want to miss this opportunity to hear what is going on in the Open Source community.

Last Tuesday, September19th, I attended the 2006 O'Reilly European Open Source Convention (OSCON) in Brussels, Belgium. Unfortunately, due to some other preoccupations, I found out about this at the last minute but I did not want to miss this opportunity to hear what is going on in the Open Source community.

The venue was the Plaza Hotel in the center of Brussels which is fantastic. A beautiful classic decor for a high tech convention alsways works well I find. Laptops of all shapes and sizes provide a refreshing contrast with renaissance furniture. The catering and other support services were also of the highest standard and well worth the fee.

I chose to attend the Tuesday session for two main reasons, the first and most important was that this was the only day I could get off work on such short notice. The second being that looking at the program, this was going to be the 'least technical' day of the four.

So 20 minutes on the subway and 5 minutes in the registration area later I was listening to the morning keynotes. A couple of interesting topics were addressed, including linking the success of the open source movement with the human drive for 

Oh, and by the way, all the presentations and some excellent pictures are available on the conference website .

After the keynotes, I chose a number of sessions dealing with the more practical implementation of open source application and some specifice business/industry cases:

• Building websites with Drupal
• Channeling open source in Europe
• Gender in open source
• Open source and Second Life
• Making It Work: How to Build a Successful Open Source Project