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O'Reilly OSCON Opens Call for Participation

Press release: December 15, 2008

O'Reilly Open Source Convention Calls for Innovation
OSCON Proposals Invited

Sebastopol, CA—Dec 15 2008—Now that big business has grasped the principles of open source, the open source community can get down to business. New times demand new ideas, and OSCON, the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, has opened its call for innovation. O'Reilly Media and program chairs Allison Randal and Edd Dumbill invite proposals for tutorials, sessions, and panels for OSCON, happening July 20 - 24, 2009, in San Jose, CA.

"Accomplishing great things with limited resources is the open source way of life," says Allison. "We hope you'll join us and share your solutions. We live in a time of enormous challenges: economic, environmental, political, and social. Open source software and the open source community have much to offer as we work to solve the world's problems, to keep moving toward a better future."

OSCON provides a central place to gain exposure to and evaluate the new projects, tools, services, platforms, languages, software, and standards sweeping through the open source community. As open source becomes fully integrated into the corporate environment, OSCON helps to define, maintain, and extend the identity of what it means to be open source. OSCON focuses on the substance of technology, filtering the information that matters most now.

OSCON seeks proposals from developers, designers, sys admins, community leaders, inventors, CTOs and CIOs, evangelists, activists, researchers, strategists, entrepreneurs, and anyone passionate about open source.

The OSCON 2009 program's themes include:

  • Doing more with less, the opportunities of a constrained economy
  • Design and usability: tools, techniques, and success stories
  • Open source in smart phones and mobile networked devices
  • Cloud computing, openness in distributed services
  • Parallelization, grid, and multicore technologies
  • Open web, open standards, open data
  • AI, machine learning, and other ways of making software smarter than the people using it
  • Open source in democracy, politics, government, and education
  • Best practices for building a business model around open source
  • Virtualization, appliances, and their creation and deployment

Building on the success of its first ten years, OSCON 2009 offers attendees:

  • Hundreds of sessions encompassing the full range of open source languages and platforms
  • Practical tutorials that go deep into technical skills, new features and applications, and best practices
  • Inspirational keynote presentations charting the evolution of open source and beyond
  • Quality time with over 3,000 fellow open source developers, hackers, experts, and users of all levels
  • An Expo Hall featuring the latest tools, projects, services, and products
  • A vibrant "hallway track" for attendees, speakers, journalists, and vendors to debate and discuss important issues
  • OSCamp, an "unconference" open to all, where the program is created by the participants
  • Fun evening events and receptions, Birds of a Feather sessions, awards ceremonies, late night parties, OSCON activities around San Jose, and plenty of networking opportunities to create new connections

As the crossroads of all things open source, OSCON offers you the place to be inspired and challenged, renew bonds to community, make new connections, and find ways to give back to the open source movement.

Past OSCON sponsors included Intel, Microsoft, Sun, Google, BT, IBM, Yahoo, Zimbra, Atlassian Software, Disney, EnterpriseDB, Etelos, Ingres, Jaspersoft, Kablink, Linagora, Mindtouch, Mozilla, Novell, Open Invention Network, OpSource, RightScale, Silicon Mechanics, Tenth Planet, Ticketmaster, VoiceRoute, White Oak Technologies, and Xaware.

Proposals will be accepted through February 3, 2009, and early registration for attendees and media will open in March. Proposals may be submitted to:
http://en.oreilly.com/oscon2009/user/proposal/propose/cfp/57

For more information on OSCON, visit:
http://conferences.oreilly.com/oscon

If you have ideas about areas you'd like to see included at the conference, send a note to: oscon-idea@oreilly.com.

If you'd like to stay up to date on information relating to OSCON, sign up for the conference newsletter (login required) at:
http://elists.oreilly.com/#conferences

For articles, blogs, photos, and other coverage of last year's event, go to:
http://en.oreilly.com/oscon2008/public/content/news-coverage

View selected presentations from OSCON 2008 at:
http://oscon.blip.tv/

Download speaker presentation slides from last year's OSCON at:
http://en.oreilly.com/oscon2008/public/schedule/proceedings

To read Tim O'Reilly's take on the future, go to the O'Reilly Radar at:
http://radar.oreilly.com/

For information about sponsorship and exhibit opportunities at OSCON, contact Sharon Cordesse at 707.827.7065 or scordesse@oreilly.com.

If you would like to discuss forming a media or promotional partnership with O'Reilly for an upcoming event, contact mediapartners@oreilly.com.

More O'Reilly Conferences:

For a conference overview, visit:
http://conferences.oreilly.com

About O’Reilly

O’Reilly Media spreads the knowledge of innovators through its books, online services, magazines, and conferences. Since 1978, O’Reilly Media has been a chronicler and catalyst of cutting-edge development, homing in on the technology trends that really matter and spurring their adoption by amplifying “faint signals” from the alpha geeks who are creating the future. An active participant in the technology community, the company has a long history of advocacy, meme-making, and evangelism.

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