Speaking at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention this Friday

If there ever were a “Sara needs a hug” moment… I’m doing a talk on Friday called Towards a Stronger Open Source Ecosystem.  It’s a story about what I’ve seen and ideas I have for the future.  I actually put together this abstract 2 years ago, so it isn’t necessarily a talk about the future of CodePlex, as my day job would led you to believe.

Here’s the abstract.  Wish me luck!

“Code speaks louder than words” is a fundamental philosophy of the open source community, because developers use code to discuss code, not words. Imagine a code review over email that did not contain a single line of code. The conversation would be lost in translation. Code is the universal language in the developer ecosystem, allowing us developers to communicate with one another.

But yet, we don’t communicate universally today. We define ourselves by our business models, our developer tools, our technologies, hence defining who we converse with. But imagine if there were no definitions or boundaries, where all developers could effectively engage together. Imagine an open source ecosystem that included all developers, regardless of platform, language, or development environment.

This talk will cover go over a roadmap for striving towards this stronger open source ecosystem through current infrastructure enhancements, fostering community growth through discoverability, project incubations and sponsorships, and paving the ways for proprietary products to evaluate various methods of going open source.