If you have noticed the earth move or shift this past weekend, do not fear I have the answer. This was the result of the evil planning of Baron “Xaprb” Schwartz who had the genius idea of inviting every big name in the open source database community for the OpenSQL Camp. The list of attendees is so awesome I can’t even dare name some of the people, you can find the full list at the event site. But this is what I can say, to have all these big egos and big brains in the same room in the small city of Charlottesville is dangerous, it can create a shift in the weight balance of the earth. It is just amazing to have all these big names in the open source community all gathered together in my town.
OpenSQL Camp used the open spaces conference style which means that multiple sessions took place at the same time in different rooms and the topics were suggested by the people attending. Most of the sessions were too technical and went over my head, which is a testament of the caliber of the people at the conference. I probably was the only person there who has no experience managing large databases. My favorite moment of the weekend had to be Friday night. That was the session dedicated as a kick off session where everyone got to mingle and meet everyone else. It just happened that alcohol was served that night and it was hilarious for me to watch hackers and geeks get drunk and try to discuss database technologies. I think it’s amazing when someone tries to juggle both keeping his balance and make a technical argument and fail, but what he fails at is the balance part. A natural skill that humans learn at age 2 becomes difficult for people like the ones who attended the conference who have spent the majority of their life sitting in front of the computer hacking away.
The main thing I got from this weekend is the following: when you have people in charge of so many important projects like Postgres, MySQL and many others come from all over the world (like Finland and Australia) to Charlottesville for a conference, it says a lot about the open source community and makes me proud to be part of it.

Recently, the Newport News, Virginia Open eGov system was released. Using the Plone content management system, the system is designed for governments to install, out of the box, a website which also includes specialized departmental infrastructure. Newport News has also made the system available under the GPL; it can be found here.

I found this quotation from their Lessons Learned document interesting: “The adoption of new technology is an iterative process of innovation and learning…” While they did not use the actual term, it seems that the team which developed Open eGov utilized an agile approach to software development. Agile development does not mean a harem scarem approach to development; the team said that they spent a significant amount of time conducting research on best practices and content management systems before undergoing the customization necessary to launch Open eGov.

We are interested to see if this product gains traction. It is part of the PloneGov project, which, while claiming members in 20 countries, does not have an apparent member list, or much reach. I think that if the Newport News staff wants to extend their reach for the product, they’ll need to answer some questions:

• How can they increase citizen participation in these sites? I see surveys, but there is no way to comment
• How to spread the word about the availability of this product? The product is, from appearances, targeted at local governments.
• Is the Plone/Python/Zope package the best one to facilitate widespread adoption? The community of developers is much smaller than of other developers. Naturally, Scott Stults, our resident Plone and Python expert, believes it’s the right answer and could be seen dancing with joy when shown the Newport News announcement.
• Why not put the project into a system that allows user contribution to it? How a developer contributes to the Open eGov project is not particularly clear. Perhaps this is an intentional result of the lack of desire to be the gatekeepers of others’ contributed code.

Seeing Open eGov is certainly, to us, a positive development. Now, we’ll see what happens next. Building a great open source platform is just one part of the puzzle; developing a vibrant open source community is another kettle of fish.

Thanks to our friend James Walker at EzGov Europe for pointing this article out to me!