The opening plenary was interesting. We had some university representation, including a guy working on the electronic medical records problem. I wish I'd gotten his name. Bruce or Brian. He worked with Steve Holden on the data visualization challenge, one of the conference puzzles (rewards awarded). Lots of chatter about NoSQL, which I've been blogging about as a possible "scrap booky" solution to some medical record services, i.e. the outermost storage is non-schematic, even if there's schematic data embedded (like on Facebook -- picture a long sheet of butcher paper, unscrolling your whole life....). The private sector is obviously far out ahead of academia but, because of intellectual property concerns, tends to burrow, play its cards close to the vest. There's something oxymoronic about an open source conference where people a keeping so many secrets, but that's life in the corporate fast lane. Governments, on the other hand, have more of an incentive to justify their existence by making whatever software development they pay for stay out there and in the open (if immunized against "national security" memes), a catalyst for further innovation among hose without the budgets to privately fund innovation. SE Linux is one (older) example. This makes governments more naturally partners of academia, although there's sometimes an awkward triangle here, with the private sector trying to get universities to generate more patents and trade secrets, even with public funding (especially with public funding). Congressman Wu (1st district, OR), gave one of the keynotes. He noted the importance of STEM subjects in today's education (science, technology, engineering and math). After leaving the podium, he made a bee line to Steve (of Holden Web, producer of this conference) to ask what happened to all the women. Where do they leak out of the STEM pipeline he wanted to know, realizing this might be a topic for another day. http://controlroom.blogspot.com/2010/09/serendipitous-opportunity.html GOSCON is coming up in October and we'll likely continue discussing these issues. Oregon is hoping to channel funding into OSU's ODL around this electronic medical records challenge, but I don't know that the caliber of the journalism is sufficient to focus public debate. Without public discussion, the right people fail to learn of one another. Willamette Week did a cover story on precisely this, which was a good sign, but failed to get at all technical, which is not a good sign. Here's my journal entry on the WW article: http://worldgame.blogspot.com/2010/08/open-source-health-care.html Kirby