I thought I had better post my belated impressions of OSCON 2005 soon or I might as well wait until next year.

This was my first trip OSCON and in addition to simply attending, I was pleased to be able to participate in the CALDAV panel. It was very well attended, with standing-room only, demonstrating that there is clearly a great deal of interest around calendaring and interoperability. Due to some technical difficulties, I was the only one able to get a demo up and running and showed off a few sharing scenarios between Chandler and Cosmo which seemed to generate some buzz from the audience. The BOF immediately afterwards meant more time for Q&A where people asked some tough questions about scheduling. I realized how wide reaching calendaring pain goes when one individual spoke up about the specific challenges of managing calendars for booking a concert venue. The only other related session, was a discussion on the complexity of calendar data interchange, the various formats and clients available. Chandler made the list and did pretty well in a comparison of different clients handling of all day events.

In addition to attending the Chandler presentations and BOFs I also registered for the Open Source Business Review which was a special track of panels geared towards the needs of enterprise businesses. Some of these sessions were more informative/relevant than others. In general, I tried to attend a variety of sessions that I thought would be interesting. I was a bit disappointed that there weren’t more sessions geared towards community building or strategies for product adoption.

A few interesting talks worth noting…

Computational Origami by Robert Lang was extremely fascinating. In addition to impressing us with a detailed cuckoo clock made out of a single sheet of paper, he discussed the math and algorithms behind origami and how those can be applied to solve real engineering problems.

Saul Griffith, one of the keynotes, spoke about Howtoons, one-page cartoons showing kids how to build things with ordinary stuff (Turkey Baster Flute, Shockwave Air Cannon). It was an interesting perspective on how we can expose the younger generation to open-source philosophies and collaboration.

Women in Open Source was a also a great panel discussion. I was surprised to learn that less than 2% of the open source community is female which is significantly less than for closed source development. Based on the animated discussion as well as attendance, I suspect this will be a topic covered at future conferences.

Overall, it was educational, fun and I came away with a much better sense of the wide variety of open source projects that are in the works.