OSCON 2014: From a Slightly Different View

Since 2005, I've attended nearly every OSCON in one capacity or another, including speaking on open source in government, open source health IT, and open source foundations 101; moderating panels; or just doing booth duty for one of my favorite non-profits. This year's event coincided with my first month as a Red Hat employee and as a member of the Open Source and Standards team (OSAS).

In addition to the insight I gained by meeting with many of my team members who were attending and contributing to the conference, other highlights for me included:

• Attending the ManageIQ BoF and learning that the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) is currently evaluating deploying it (which also afforded me the opportunity for a government-oss-geeky sidebar thereafter)
• Sitting in on the CentOS session, which had a pretty packed room, a great presentation by the CentOS team, and interesting audience participation
• Meeting with Prof. Steven Jacobs and Remy DeCausemaker of Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) and learning more about their Minor in Open Source program, which Red Hat has underwritten
• Meeting with Oregon State University Open Source Lab's (OSUOSL) Lance Albertson and Professor Carlos Jensen, and learning more about what they're up to in leveraging their operations to create educational opportunities for students on campus and beyond, and hearing how they're using CentOS and GlusterFS
• Seeing a host of old friends who were wildly supportive of my move to Red Hat.

As for OSCON, the increased number of community-focused sidebar events is worth noting. In addition to the traditional Community Leadership Summit preceding OSCON (which Jono Bacon announced would spawn at least six new “CLSx” event locations in the coming year) and all the usual BoFs, OSI board member Allison Randal launched and led a new OSI FLOSS Foundations “Entities” discussion at Mozilla PDX, and a Community Metrics Working Group session was conducted at Puppet Labs.

The OSAS team members' work to support Red Hat's upstream communities is well known and, from the feedback I received in Portland, very much appreciated. Less understood is the Open Source and Standards group as an entity, and the significant Red Hat investment it represents to the community. I hope to help close that gap in the coming months as I go through my own discovery process.