skip page navigation Oregon State University

Conferences, Conferences, Conferences: OSL Staff Out and About in March

March is proving to be a busy month for OSL staffers at various technical conferences, and we wanted to bring the community an update about our past and upcoming adventures.

Deborah Bryant, our Public Sector Communities Manager, led a panel discussion at the 3rd Annual Humanitarian Free and Open Source (HFOSS) Software Symposium on HFOSS in Local Government. Our Open Source Outreach Manager, Leslie Hawthorn, is a long-time advisor to the Humanitarian FOSS Project and also joined for the Symposium. You can read the event report she penned on opensource.com.

Greg Lund-Chaix, our super star project manager, spent last week at DrupalCon Chicago. Among the many parts of the conference that Greg found to be awesome, once again the Hallway Track and Birds of a Feather (BoF) session rocked! You can hear more from Greg about his experiences at DrupalCon Chicago on his blog.

Last but not least, our Lead Developer, Peter Krenesky, attended PyCon 2011 and was pleased to join his fellow Pythonistas in spontaneous applause over list comprehensions. Peter brought back lots of great news from the conference, including the fact that everyone seems to be hiring Python developers. Check out Peter's blog post on PyCon for links to session videos and more insights from PyCon.

We also have a few upcoming speaking engagements for the rest of the month. Deborah Bryant and Leslie Hawthorn will both be attending the upcoming Palmetto Open Source Conference (POSSCON) next week in Columbia, South Carolina, USA. Deb will be speaking in the Leadership Track, which will explore all aspects of open source software that impact CTOs, CIOs, IT Managers and other decision makers: the latest technology, best practice case studies, license and legal issues, ROI and Cost-Benefit data, etc. Deb will discuss Open Source Trends in Government: How is it being used? on Thursday, March 24th at 13:15.

Leslie Hawthorn will be speaking in the POSSCON Education track, which is specifically intended for high school and college level IT Directors, administrators, teachers, professors, and students. On Wednesday, March 23rd at 15:15, she will address Student Involvement in Open Source: Why, How and Where to Get Involved. The session will be useful for students who are completely new to open source, those who'd like to get more involved and any one who would like to help more students engage with open source communities.

Conference registration remains open, so you may want to consider joining us at POSSCON. We'll also prepare and share a conference wrap up report.

Leslie Hawthorn will spend the last week of March in Massachusetts, addressing students at the University of Massachusetts Amherst on similar topics. She's also been invited as a panelist to the university's annual ICT Summit, and will discuss Open Collaboration Models on Thursday, March 31st at 9:10. Registration for the summit is still open, so if you'd be in or around the area and would find the summit useful, take a moment to sign up.

Phew! March Madness takes on a whole new meaning when it comes to community outreach. We hope to see friends at our upcoming speaking engagements, and were grateful for the opportunities to meet with old friends, make new friends and learn more from the open source community at each of the events we traveled to recently. Finally, we would like to thank the organizers and sponsors of the HFOSS Symposium, POSSCON, PyCon and the UMass ICT Summit for their generous travel sponsorship for our employees, which allows the OSL to participate in these fantastic events.

See our news archive for other OSUOSL news stories.