Category Archives: oregon

OSCON Report

I had a great time at OSCON this year. A few highlights:

As usual, the real value was in the hallway conversations, shared meals, and other informal discussions with really smart people.

I will be posting video of our Art of Community panel (thanks to Drew Scott for wielding the camera!) and some footage from Beeforge on the Jivespace Video Podcast blog over the next week or 2.

Having Fun at OSCON (Beer, Community, and More!)

I wanted to let people know about a few fun activities during the week of OSCON.

Beer Forge

This is a great after party sponsored by Jive Software (my employer) and POSSE (I’m a member) along with OSL, OpenSourcery, and OTBC.

When: Thursday, July 26, 2007, 6:00 PM to 8:30 PM

Where: Thirsty Lion Pub, 71 SW 2nd Avenue, Portland, OR 97209 (just a couple stops on the MAX Light Rail from the Oregon Convention Center)

How: Please RSVP to rsvp@jivesoftware.com to receive a copy of the invitation or download the invite. I’ll also try to carry around a little stash of invites during OSCON, so let me know if you need one.

Technology Community Leader Meetup

We had so much fun at the Technology Community Leader Meetup in SF before OSBC that I thought we should have another one around OSCON / Ubuntu Live in PDX on July 24th from 6-7:30pm.

Anyone currently leading, managing, or otherwise involved in technology communities (open source, web 2.0, wikis, etc.) is welcome to attend. Feel free to forward this invite on to others. It should be fun!

Location is TBD until I have an idea of how many people plan to attend. It will be somewhere in or near the Portland Convention center. If you would like to attend, please RSVP on upcoming.

Art of Community Session

Danese Cooper and I put together a community panel at OSCON on Thursday from 4:30 – 5:15 (right before BeerForge). We’ll have a great group of people on the panel including:

Jimmy Wales
Karl Fogel
Geir Magnussen
Sulamita Garcia
Whurley

Werewolf

The Portland Werewolf group plans to organize some werewolf games during OSCON (date /time still TBD).

Clearspace Collaboration Environment from Jive Software

I was lucky enough to get an early preview of Clearspace from the Jive Software team, a local Portland, Oregon company. They have just starting talking about Clearspace on the Jive Talks blog with a recent post from Sam Lawrence. They have not yet released details, and portions of the product were in varying stages of completion when I played with it, so I will not go into any specific details here.

What I will say is that this product is cool. It is intuitive to use and has a “web 2.0” feel to it with modern collaboration functionality built into the system from the beginning. None of the retrofit feel that older applications have when someone tries to cram a bunch of new technology into an ancient product. This will be a product to test drive when Jive launches it in early 2007:

“The idea for Clearspace actually came from our customers, who through their conversations with our sales, marketing, professional services and customer support teams had been asking for many different collaborative feature additions to Jive Forums and Knowledge Base. Some of these were very specific, others borrowed from a lot of the collaborative elements of completely different point solutions. At the beginning of last year we took a big step back and realized that the sum of what was being requested was a completely new, much more comprehensive product.

So, a year ago we faced very tough decisions. Up to that point we had planned to address our customer requests through a combination of improvements to our existing products and/or building a couple of totally new products. Our big decision was was whether to build three products or one. The more we talked about it the more we recognized the massive benefit that could be realized by a single, unified, flexible architecture– sort of like that quote from Lord of the Rings–”one ring to unite them all.” (ok, it was really “rule them all” but that’s too harsh.)” (Quote from Sam Lawrence on Jive Talks)