Euro FOO And Euro OSCON 2006

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from Euro OSCON as it was the first open source conference I’d been to and I was slightly concerned that it would be lots of dry talks about project updates, but I
needn’t have worried. The only version numbers mentioned where the Everything 2.0 meme brands mentioned in the O’Reilly talks. Instead of being dry the talks were energetic and enthusiastic rallying cries to the free software community that Mark Shuttleworth commented rules the web and is looking for new areas in which it can be a force for good.

One of those areas is politics and society. Tom Steinberg talked about MySociety.org’s amazing WriteToThem, TheyWorkForYou and PledgeBank projects which are making UK politics more transparent and easier to engage in. Adrian Holovaty talked about similar projects in the US in his Journalism via Computer Programming keynote while Suw Charman of the Open Rights Group (which is funded through PledgeBank pledges) gave lots of advice to the nascent German Pirate Party in a Euro FOO session about fighting for transparent government and against crippling DRM and software patents. The fight against patents was described in detail and at high speed by Florian Mueller who crammed his 40 minute session in to a 15 minute morning keynote so he could race off to fight the good fight.

Another strong theme was Climate Change. Gavin Starks presented the dire situation with chilling clarity in a Euro FOO session and described the work he is doing with Global Cool to educate people about their carbon footprint and what they can do to reduce it before Tim O’Reilly revealed that they are planning a climate change conference and asked the attendees for speaker suggestions. Tor Nørretranders explained open source, altruism and why we dare care and share using the handicap principle before proposing that climate change is the problem that we should be solving now by “Getting online with the sunshine”. I’ve been talking to Gavin Starks since the conference ended and will hopefully be able to make time to work with him bringing Global Cool to Second Life in the near future.

The two talks I gave on Second Life were both very well received. The first introduced Second Life and the online games that preceded it before talking about the open source foundations of the Second Life platform, our current work integrating Mozilla and Mono, the open source projects inside Second Life and our plans to open source the platform in the future. There were lots of interesting questions and I gave interviews after the talk with Deeeep Witte of SL Business Magazine and Ewan Spence for The Tech Conference Show. The keynote I gave on Wednesday asked why Residents in Second Life are more likely to contribute to its creation than people using the Web, eBay, Wikipedia or Linux and presented some speculative possible answers. The slides for both presentations can be found here and here. qDot’s teledildonics work was also mentioned in Simon Wardley’s “Making The Web of Things” talk as an example of the sort of Spime like applications which have both digital and physical aspects and are the likely applications of matter compilers. At the start of the conference lots of people I spoke to said they had heard of Second Life, but were avoiding it as they new they would spend far too much time hacking in it, but when Mark Shuttleworth talked about connecting synthetic worlds with Ubuntu in his closing keynote, at least 10 people in the audience said they were Second Life residents, 1 of whom had told me that they had logged on to Second Life for the first time after my keynote and stayed up until 4AM in world. Even more encouragingly the only person in the audience who raised their hand when asked if they were a World of Warcraft player was a Linden.

Euro OSCON was nothing like the dry but worthy conference I was fearing. It was an amazing, vibrant experience full of smart energetic people ready to change the world for the better. So, a lot like Second Life then.