onfocus

I'm blogging live from the Portland Convention Center where OSCON 2006 is well underway. After attending Webvisions last week, it's amazing to see a conference that is several orders of magnitude bigger. Instead of a few hundred people spanning a handful of conference rooms, OSCON feels like thousands of people spanning dozens of rooms. (Don't quote me on the numbers.)

It's always great to hear Tim O'Reilly talk about what he's thinking about. He listed five ideas related to open source that are designed to provoke the audience:

1. Architecture of Participation
2. Open Source Licenses Are Obsolete
3. Asymmetric Competition
4. Operations as Advantage
5. End of Open Data

Out of context, these probably don't mean much. But I've added them here for my own benefit. And he included a couple of quotes that I'd like to remember: "When the best leader leads, the people say, 'We did it ourselves.'" -Lao Tzu, and "In the future, 'being on someone's platform' will mean being hosted on their infrastructure." - Debra Chrapaty, VP Windows Live.

Anil had a keynote this morning as well, and he talked about making meaningful applications to help people connect. He also talked about the open source Six Apart developer tools for building scalable web apps. He mentioned that most of the applications we think about when we think Web 2.0 are using at least some of the tools. I didn't realize how widely they were used.

Conference organizer Nat talked about a new focus on talks about community at OSCON—one of my primary areas of interest. And there are a bunch of sessions today that aren't specifically about coding that I'd like to see.

I'm in Michael Buffington's talk about games with Rails now...