This Thursday, 27 May, I am going to be closing out a day of awesome talks in an online seminar called Open Your World Forum. This is a production from opensource.com, and if the quality of the line-up this time is any indication, the producers have some great talent at drawing together a wide range of voices. My closing talk is on The Open Source Way wiki and book, and I’m just finishing my notes for my presentation.  Register before you move on.
8:45 a.m. – Welcome & introductions, Michael Tiemann
9:00 a.m. – Dr. David Upton, Chair of Operations Management, Oxford University
9:45 a.m. – Free and Open Technologies: A Policy Update from the European Union, Karsten Gerloff, President, Free Software Foundation Europe and Graham Taylor, Chief Executive of OpenForum Europe
10:30 a.m. – 15 MINUTE BREAK
10:45 a.m. – Matt Jadud, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Allegheny College
11:30 a.m. – Wikimedia: Strategic Planning the Open Source Way, Eugene Eric Kim, Cofounder & Principal, Blue Oxen Associates
12:15 p.m. – 15 MINUTE BREAK
12:30 p.m. – Q&A: Creative Commons and the Music Industry, Daniel James, director, 64 Studio Ltd.; Curt Smith, solo musician, singer and songwriter as well as co-founder of Tears for Fears; and musician Brad Sucks
1:15 p.m. – The Stimulus and Standards, Dr. John Halamka, CIO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School and chair of the US Healthcare Information Technology Standards Panel
2:00 p.m. – 15 MINUTE BREAK
2:15 p.m. – Michael Tiemann, Vice President of Open Source Affairs at Red Hat and President of the Open Source Initiative
3:00 p.m. – Open Source License Compliance, Richard Fontana, Open Source Licensing and Patent Counsel, Red Hat, Inc.
3:45 p.m. – 15 MINUTE BREAK
4:00 p.m. – Open Source for America, Jeremy Allison, Linux Evangelist, Google, and Terri Molini, public/investor relations consultant with Initmarketing, the Open Source Marketing Agency
4:45 p.m. – The Open Source Way: Creating and nurturing communities of contributors, Karsten Wade, Sr. Community Architect, Red Hat, Inc.
There are already two lessons learned from this first Open Your World Forum — learning as you go is part of the open marketing experience.
First, the team put together the forum on very short notice and elected to use a known system for presenting, provided by a vendor (Thomson Reuters), rather than research open source solutions. I haven’t seen this system, but I’m fairly certain it is not an open source project.  This is the kind of thing that happens in the real world, where time, money, and opportunity are finite. The key from here is to get it in the plans to use an open solution next time, and I understand that is the case. Perhaps John Adams will write a post about the experience for the business channel.
Second, the presenter selection could use some diversity in voices, particularly different cultures and sexes. As I commented extensively, the presenter crew is 100% men and 92% European in ancestory. I think we can do a lot better than that, and I’ll do what I can to help find that diversity to add to the width and depth of the voices at future Open Your World Forums.