Digital Freedom Expo: Day 2

Day 2 of the DFX wasn’t quite as exciting as the previous day. Attendance was down after the big first day splash (Lawrence Lessig and Jimmy Wales weren’t there), and my exhaustion after a few late nights probably had something to do with it too.

Rishab Ayer Ghosh gave a taste of some extensive research into FOSS software done at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands – more details are available on the Flossworld.org and flossimpact.eu sites.

Philip Greenspun presented on sustainable online communities, and spoke of his experiences with photo.net. His solar magnitude metaphor for forums and so on was particularly interesting. Just as with the night sky, we see the nearby lights and bright distant lights, we’re interested in seeing items of local interest, as well as the brightest from further afield.

Derek Keats presented on AVOIR and the remixable web in general, and a woman whose name I didn’t catch (she didn’t seem to be on the programme) discussed her involvement with Curriki, a global education and learning community.

Brian Behlendorf, this time in the main hall, presented on what building an open source business means for the main stream, and although by this time I needed matchsticks to keep my eyes open, I found this one of the most interesting presentations of the expo. He mentioned SugarCRM as one of the blurring examples, as the company and project have the same name, and said that they’re not actually open source. Strictly speaking he’s right, as their license is not OSI-approved. The presentation ended with a quote: Don’t be evil – easier said than done!

Finally, I attended Morgan Collet’s Birds of a Feather dialogue, with about 4 other people, and unexpectedly got copies of the latest Kubuntu and Ubuntu. He mentioned the Ubuntu South Africa group, which I see is running a competition to win the Ubuntu book if you sign up on their wiki.

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