Question Time on Open Source – Luton 11/05/10 1

PanelistsJaneandPeter110510

In the style of the BBC program Question Time, join us for an evening of Q & A on Open Source software.The Open Source Specialist Group (OSSG) joins forces with BCS Bedford for an entertaining evening debating this hot topic. Is Linux the answer to everything? Can Open Source software provide a real viable alternative in the business world?

A panel of experts detailed below will be available to answer your questions and adjudicating events will be the OSSG Chair, Mark Elkins. If you have a question please submit this before the event to mark_elkins@bcs.org although, just like the real program, we will take some questions on the night.

Click on this link to Register for this event

Time: 7pm for 7:30pm start

Location – Room J110, First Floor, Vicarage Street Campus, Vicarage Street, University of Bedfordshire, Luton LU1 3JU. Use Mall (Arndale) shopping centre car park (free from 6pm)

Directions – http://www.beds.ac.uk/contactus/directions

Contact details: Mark Elkins via mark_elkins@bcs.org

Panelists

Jane Curry a consultant with 29 years experience in operating systems, communications and systems management. Highly experienced in many business sectors with an IT skill-set ranging from microcomputers to mainframes. An IBM Certified Tivoli Consultant and Instructor dedicated to providing high quality systems and network management consultancy with a commitment to education and training. More recently, Jane has been working with Open Source systems management offerings such as Zenoss, OpenNMS and Nagios and was recently awarded the title of Zenoss Master by Zenoss Inc. A professional member of the British Computer Society well versed in educating others regarding technical roles in business computing. Jane is also very interested in promoting IT as a career, especially for women. To this end, she is a Science Engineering Technology (SET) Ambassador and has acted as mentor to a female postgraduate student in the IT department at Oxford Brookes University.

Peter Dawes-Huish, CEO for LinuxIT, has been part of CRN’s A-List for two years in a row and is a member of the Society of Industry Leaders (SIL). In 2006 LinuxIT was chosen IT Services Supplier of the Year at the Computing Awards for Excellence. LinuxIT helps companies throughout Europe by delivering IT consulting, technology and support services through the integration of Open Source solutions.

Michael Kay develops the Saxon XSLT and XQuery processor for manipulating XML; he is the founder of Saxonica, which develops and licenses both the open source and commercial versions of the product. Both versions have a large user base, including many high-throughput and high-profile applications especially in publishing and financial services. As an open source project there are probably two distinctive features worth noting about Saxon: the fact that the software (200K lines of code) is almost entirely developed by one person, and the successful use of a dual-licensing business model. Before starting the development of Saxon ten years ago, Michael was an ICL Fellow, having spent nearly 25 years with ICL as a software product designer and in a variety of other systems architecture and senior engineering roles. As well as developing Saxon, he is editor of the W3C XSLT language specification, and has written the definitive book on the language. He is a frequent conference speaker, and his contributions to the XML community were recognized in 2005 by the award of the XML Cup.

Richard Taylor is a System Architect and Technology Analyst at QinetiQ, he has a background in software systems research with a particular interest in the fields of Systems of Systems Architectures and Open Source Software.As well as doing research work he has hands on implementation experience as an Integration Architect for multi-site, multi-tier, fully redundant enterprise information systems for high transaction rate Internet applications. Richard has been advising the MOD and central government on Open Source issues for more than a decade. He advised the OGC on the formulation of the eGif standards, was co-author of the Defence Scientific Advisory Council report into Open Source Software and part of the QinetiQ team that helped to develop the UK government policy on use of Open Source Software. His main area of research has focused on achieving desired emergent properties in large scale Systems of Systems through novel architectural assessment approaches that can be applied in the public sector acquisition cycle. He has worked with organisations to exploit an appreciation of the emergent properties of complex Systems of Systems to achieve enterprise goals through the practical application of IS policy. He is also a developer of Open Source software including contributions to a number of projects and he helps to run the PyConUK and EuroPython Python programming language conferences.


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