OSSG News

News about the OSSG’s activities


Affiliation with Rust London Community

The BCS Open Source Specialist Group (OSSG) is excited to affiliate with the Rust London Community and our new affiliation and support page.

The OSSG is a body of IT professionals consisting of more than 1,500 open source specialists from industry and academia. The Rust programming language is a community project with a vibrant open source ecosystem that brings together the performance of C with the memory safety of Java. 

With the affiliation to the Rust London community, the OSSG will support the community by co-organizing events, announcing events for the Rust community in its calendar, providing letters of endorsement, and giving access to facilities and funding on demand. The first jointly organized event will be revolving around “Embedded Rust” in August.

Statement from the Rust London Community

The Rust London Community is pleased to be affiliated with the BCS Open Source Specialist Group. The Rust programming language has the ethos of empowering through collaboration in its DNA. We here at Rust London are excited to open up our community and connect with the OSSG.

The Rust ecosystem keeps growing and maturing every day. The positive moves forward are reflected in the 2020 Stack Overflow Survey. Rust was voted the most loved programming language for the 5th year in a row, and this is also reflected in the growth of the programming language’s adoption commercially. Several companies and community projects are starting to use Rust more extensively, from web development to space satellites, embedded devices, and game engines. 

Rust London is a place where these companies and individuals can showcase what they are currently doing, what they aspire to do with the language, and how they will positively contribute to the Rust ecosystem. We have grown the community to over 2100 members on Meetup.com, and have more than 700 followers on Twitter. 

The OSSG and the Rust London Community are both excited about what our friendship and connection will bring.


Open Source Hardware Camp 2018 — Lincoln, 30/06 + 01/07

30th June 2018, 09:00 Saturday morning – 16:00 on the Sunday afternoon at The Blue Room, The Lawn, Union Rd, Lincoln, LN1 3BU, [map].

Open Source Hardware Camp 2018 will be hosted in the historic county town of Lincoln — home to, amongst others, noted engine builders Ruston & Hornsby (now Siemens, via GEC and English Electric). This year OSHCamp will feature a total of 10 talks on the Saturday, with 7 hands-on workshops on the Sunday.

Lincoln is well served by rail, reachable from Leeds and London within 2-2.5 hours, and 4-5 hours from Edinburgh and Southampton.

There will be a social at the Wig and Mitre on the Saturday evening.

Tickets are priced at £10/day and this includes lunch.

To register visit: http://oshcamp2018.eventbrite.co.uk

Saturday :: Talks

Introduction to cycle-accurate Verilog simulation

Developing hardware designs in Verilog is tricky, for both FPGA platforms and ASIC hardware targets. Understanding the behaviour of a design, testing it, and debugging are made much easier by simulating in software. There are a variety of simulation approaches with different trade-offs in what properties of the design are accurately modelled and how quickly they run. This talk starts by giving a brief overview of the approaches, then focusing in more detail on cycle-accurate modelling, which is a relatively fast approach that is robustly implemented in an open-source tool called Verilator. The main focus will be on working with CPU designs, but the software and techniques are generally applicable to other areas.

A brief overview of how to use Verilator to simulate a design, to develop testbenches, and to visualise simulation output using GTKWave will be given. The software and techniques discussed in this talk will be put into practice in the “Open-source RISC-V core quickstart” workshop on Sunday.

Dr Graham Markall has a background in languages and compilers for scientific computing, and is well known for his work on the Numba project. He is part of Embecosm’s GNU tool chain team, where his current projects include the implementation of security enhancements to the GCC and LLVM compilers for RISC-V and ARM, and the development a GCC-based toolchain for a customised RISC-V processor.

LoRaWAN at 100,000 feet & 10mW with High Altitude Ballooning

High-altitude balloons are manned or unmanned balloons, usually filled with helium, that are released into the stratosphere and generally attaining between 18,000 to 37,000 metres (59,000 to 121,000 ft; 11 to 23 mi). In 2002, a balloon named BU60-1 attained 53.0 km (32.9 mi; 173,900 ft).

The advent of cheap open source electronics & suitable GPS chips has allowed hobbyists worldwide to build fly & (usually) recover these balloons since the mid 2000’s with modest budgets compared to professional weather balloons. Indeed, the Raspberry Pi Foundation ran a few Skycademy events aimed at helping school teachers. There is a wealth of information available from the United Kingdom High Altitude Society (UKHAS), their website HabHUB.org and Dave Ackerman’s website.

Ofcom limit the power of any airborne transmitter to 10mW, which whilst tiny isn’t a practical problem since the line of sight is usually superb. The community stated using RTTY initially but latterly has begun to use LoRaWAN to transmit the telemetry and some of the pictures taken during a typical 2 to 3 hour flight. The Civil Aviation Authority will grant permission for such flight via their system, NOTAMs. It’s normal to be asked to contact air traffic control before launch to make sure commercial aviation traffic isn’t hindered.

Tony Brookes is a member of the Derby Makers who is leading a project to launch such a balloon (or more if funding permits) over the summer. Derby Makers are now resident in the Radio Communications Museum of Great Britain in Derby following their tenure in the Derby Silk Mill museum which is now undergoing HLF funded refurbishment.

Machine Vision

Machine Vision is one of the fastest growing disciplines in robotics and automation. In the past, discrete vision processing tasks have been both complex and brittle requiring a great deal of specialisation and practice. Now however machine learning (ML) inference is becoming practical at the edge, Machine Vision is one of the emerging ‘edge applications’ of ML inference technology. Machine Vision is much less brittle than earlier approaches and promises much wider and simpler applications. This talk (and hands on workshop) will explore the landscape of Machine Vision and its applications for robotics and automation.

Alan Wood has been working with parallel distributed programming for several decades. His recent work includes smart grids, 3D printers, robotics, automation and biotec diagnostics. His current research is focused on machine learning for embedded automation using FPGA, CSP and Neural Turing Machines. He is a long term advocate of open source communities, a moderator (aka Folknology) for xCORE, the co-founder of myStorm open hardware FPGA community, as well as a co-founder of Surrey and Hampshire Makerspace.

Making Electronic Tesla Coils – Keeping in the Magic Smoke

This talk will give an overview of designing and building an electronic Tesla coil from off the shelf or easily modified components. It will cover the safety, construction methods and some of the theory of operation. It will also present details of the controls and methods needed to prevent the Tesla coil from destroying itself when power is applied.

Derek Woodroffe has been building Tesla coils as a hobby for over 20 years. He has constructed over 30 different Tesla coils, from 30mm to over 1M tall and of many different types. He runs both the Nottingham Gaussfest and Cambridge Tesla coiler meet-ups and has worked a number of times on TV to assist with Tesla coil and high voltage demonstrations to programs such as the Royal Institute Christmas Lectures and Dara O Briain’s Science club. Derek also has a keen interest in all other uses and generators of high voltage and has built working examples of many. His projects are detailed on www.extremeelectronics.co.uk.

Amazingly, he is still alive.

Turning your hobby project in to a business for fun and profit

Designing hardware is the easy part. Turning it in to a business is where it gets interesting. This talk will cover some of the things needed to take it to market, including stock, marketing, shipping, support, cash flow.

Spencer Owen like many kids in the 80s, loved his ZX Spectrum and other 8 bit computers. This set him up for a career in IT, and he worked as a server engineer and network engineer for many years. In 2013, in a bid to see if he really understood how computers worked at the lowest level, Spencer went back to his roots built a simple Z80 based machine on a breadboard. This was to mature in to the RC2014, which Spencer started selling in his spare time in 2015. Within a few months it was clear that the RC2014 was taking up more time than he had spare, so he quit network job and started a retro computer kit company. Spencer is now the largest supplier of Z80 computers worldwide.

MakerNet Alliance

A brief presentation of ideas the MakerNet Alliance is working on with E-nable.org for a Design Ecology Interface, to visualize the evolution of open source designs for prosthetics (and ultimately any hardware designs) and help users find the design version with the features they need. The presentation will be followed by discussion session with the audience to get feedback on the ideas and input on requirements.

Anna Sera Lowe has always been fascinated by how things are made and how they get to the people who need them. As a manufacturing manager and later a supply chain consultant, she made a career of finding great excuses to visit manufacturing facilities around the globe; from multi-million dollar automated factories to informal waste-processing operations on dumps (sometimes next to each other) – and everything in between. She has consulted for clients as diverse as Johnson & Johnson, the state electricity monopoly of South Africa, and the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis, and Malaria. Over the last few years her interest has been caught by ideas around grassroots innovation and distributed manufacturing networks. She co-founded Kumasi Hive, a makerspace in Ghana, and is leading work on MakerNet, an initiative to explore business models and digital tools for local manufacturing of useful goods for development.

EMC for IoT

Often the last thing on your mind when working on an exciting new project are the regulatory hurdles that come with getting a product ready for sale in the European market. These afterthoughts suddenly become pressing priorities as you approach your launch date. Electro-Magnetic Compatibility (EMC) is the study of how all electronic devices and phenomena interact and, in our increasingly electro-dense society, these requirements become all the more important. Without EMC and radio regulations we would suffer interference to the wireless infrastructure we so depend on.

This talk will give a tour through the EMC and radio regulations for a typical IoT type product (equally applicable to any electronics product), why they are required and look at some of the risks and pitfalls involved in the process. If you’ve got a product that you want to start selling, have limited experience or are merely EMC-curious then this talk will be extremely useful. Questions often asked include: Why do I need to do EMC testing? What about if I have a radio module in my product? What sort of certificate should I have? Do I even need to do anything? You’ll find some of the answers here.

James Pawson, Unit 3 Compliance. Having a broad background of electronics experience (and also a beard), James found himself drawn to the field of EMC partly because of the interesting variety of work and partly because no one else wanted to do it. Twelve years later, now with his own test laboratory and consultancy business, he has found his vocation in helping solve people’s EMC problems. He’s also found more grey hairs in his beard and worries that the two are related.

Non-Standard Computation — From Bits to Pulses to Spikes

Taken together the rise of parallel distributed processing and the end of Moore’s law has brought a renaissance in alternative views of computation. This talk is a journey through the rapidly changing area of non-standard computation: from GPU’s, tensor and neuromorphic processors to stochastic, temporal and quantum computation. The main aim of the talk is to describe the tremendous opportunities that currently exist for radical change in computational paradigms, and crucially for the open source community, in the delivery of these architectures.

Jonny Edwards is the CEO/CTO of Temporal Computing – the first business in the UK to focus on temporal computation methods. The work on temporal computing started in the Non-Standard Computation Group at York University, via several Unconventional Computing Conferences, and has since attracted VC and IUK funding to support long-term commercial exploitation.

It’s the people, stupid! (But the people aren’t stupid) — Hardware as an enabler to Heating as as Service

Why are clocks slowing down over western Europe like halving your heating bills at home?

Remember when at the start of the year a row in one corner of what used to be Yugoslavia caused clocks across Europe to slow down and eventually lose six minutes? Nothing technical was broken, and it’s a reminder that people issues can’t just be ‘fixed’ blindly with tech.

When a purely technical fix for energy efficiency is installed, for example a better boiler, savings tend to persist for many years, maybe for a decade if the tech lasts that long.

Solutions that may make as big a difference but rely on the people around it continuing to do something to assist, tend to have much shorter persistence. Maybe between one and four years.

We already have a smart radiator valve called “Radbot” that can knock 20–50% off your heating bills and pay for itself in a year. It requires very little input if any to do its job. But it won’t work if people open all their windows in winter and expect magic to happen. Yes, some people do.

We just finished an Innovate UK project “Heating as a Service – Lite”. We are more convinced than ever that while the technical and financial elements are probably easy to find solutions to, the social part, making things that work with real people for a long time, is intriguing!

Damon Hart-Davis created the OpenTRV project following his 2012 presentation to DECC’s smart heating workshop. He has freelanced in technology for over 30 years, delivering mission-critical products from design to production in the City for more than 20 of those, and has founded and been involved in several start-ups over that time with his creations seen on TV, the Web, and his pioneering Internet Service Provider helping crack open that market more than 25 years ago. A previous virtual/on-line credit-card company start-up that he co-founded as CTO, Ixaris, turns over ~GBP13m.

Bela, an embedded platform for ultra-low latency audio and sensor processing

Bela started off as a research project at Centre For Digital Music (Queen Mary University of London) and is now a commercial product, mainly aimed at makers, programmers and researchers that work with audio. The platform is based on a BeagleBone Black with a custom expansion cape and a dedicated software environment. The board runs Debian Linux with Xenomai as a real-time co-kernel. The combined use of Xenomai and the BeagleBone Black’s on-board PRU microcontroller allows to achieve sub-millisecond latency for audio and sensor processing, while node.js is used to provide a user-friendly web-based IDE. The project is entirely open source, hardware and software.

Giulio Moro is a PhD student in the Centre for Digital Music at Queen Mary University of London. A sound engineer by training, he is now researching in the field of performer-instrument interaction. He is one of the inventors and core developers of Bela.

Note that this talk was originally given at OSHUG #63 in London and is being repeated at OSHCamp as a refresher and to serve as an introduction for the workshop on the Sunday.

Compered by:

Dr Jeremy Bennett is founder and Chief Executive of Embecosm, a consultancy specializing in the development of open source compiler tool chains.

Sunday :: Workshops

Open-source RISC-V core quickstart

An introductory workshop for getting starting with simulating RISC-V cores using Verilator, which is an open-source tool for generating cycle-accurate models of hardware designs written in Verilog. Although this workshop focuses on simulation, the cores can in general be instantiated on FPGAs for use in real applications (and higher performance!)

The workshop will use two or three different RISC-V implementations (including Clifford Wolf’s PicoRV32 and Ariane from the PuLP platform). Loading and executing programs onto these bare metal systems through a testbench and also through a debugger (GDB) will be covered, along with some examples of interacting with the cores, and inspecting their state. Gathering accurate performance measurements is also possible, because the simulations are cycle-accurate.

The tutorial materials will provide enough implementation that it is possible to follow this workshop without having had prior experience of hardware design or Verilog specifically – however, some understanding of programming and the organisation of computer hardware will be required.

The workshop should be of interest to people with a background in software who would like to tinker with open-source processor core development, and people with a background in hardware who would like to tinker with software toolchains.

Participants should bring:

  • Their laptop

Run by: Dr Graham Markall

An introductory workshop to NetBSD on embedded platforms

An introductory workshop to NetBSD in the context of developing embedded platforms. NetBSD is a fully featured operating system with great agility that has been around for many many years. This workshop is intended to introduce some of the features which are available in the operating system as standard. We’ll explore how to go from obtaining the source code to building the operating system, cover features which simplify working with the system, how accessible it is without resorting to installing third party software or writing any C.

Topics we will cover:

  • Cross compilation support with build.sh
  • File tamper detection / execution prevention with Veriexec
  • High-level access to subsystems e.g exploring GPIO via Lua
  • Rapid development with Rumpkernel

Participants should bring:

  • A laptop (Macos, Linux or Windows (windows 10 specifically))
  • ARM board (BeagleBoneBlack preferably or a Pi and such)
  • USB UART for serial access

Sevan Janiyan is founder of Venture 37, which provides system administration & consultancy services. As a fan of operating systems and computers with different CPU architectures, in his spare time he maintains builds of open source software on a variety of systems featuring PowerPC, SPARC and armv7l CPUs. He hopes to own a NeXTcube & OMRON LUNA-88K2 one day.

High Altitude Ballooning

An in-depth look at the help and advice available online, likely costs and technical issues for those wanting to build, fly and recover a HAB. If our project has some spares available, I’ll try and bring them along so people can see what’s being discussed.

If we’re lucky there may be a balloon launch somewhere in the world that we can follow during the session!

Participants should bring:

  • Their laptop

Run by: Tony Brookes

Machine Vision

A hands-on machine vision workshop – further details TBC.

Participants should bring:

  • Their laptop

Run by: Alan Wood

Soldering Workshop

A soldering workshop where novices get to assemble and program the Cuttlefish, Arduino-compatible, kit.

Chelsea Back is a trainee engineer and is working towards a degree in Electronic Engineering. She enjoys building microcontroller projects and teaching people how to solder, is a student member of the IET and a STEM Ambassador.

Build a Z80 based retro computer

A step-by-step build of a RC2014 Mini Z80 Retro Computer. Approx 2 hours should be enough time to assemble a computer running BASIC.

Participants will need to purchase a (heavily discounted) RC2014 Mini. Some soldering experience is assumed.

Participants should bring:

  • Their laptop
  • A soldering iron, wire cutters, FTDI cable and laptop if you have them

Run by: Spencer Owen

Bela: an embedded platform for ultra-low latency audio and sensor processing

This hands-on workshop introduces Bela, an embedded platform for ultra-low latency audio and sensor processing. Bela is useful for creating digital musical instruments and other interactive projects, which can be developed in C/C++, Pure Data (Pd) or Supercollider. The platform features an on-board browser-based IDE for getting started quickly. In this workshop we will guide participants through connecting sensors and accessing them from C++ or PureData and use them to control the generated sound. On Bela, sensor inputs are sampled at audio frequency and with high resolution (16bit), in order to allow for detailed, nuanced interactions. The hardware and software architecture allows sub-millisecond latency, allowing for expressive musical performances, as well as feedback control of physical systems.

Participants should bring:

  • Their laptop

Run by: Giulio Moro

Travel & Accommodation

For travel and accommodation details please see the OSHUG website.

Registration

To register vist: http://oshcamp2018.eventbrite.co.uk

Sponsored by:


Call for Open Source Project Contest Applications

Code

The BCS OSSG desires to support and encourage students and apprentices to use and develop open source software and hardware in their project work.

All students and apprenticesare invited to enter one of the project contests sponsored by the BCS Open Source Specialist Group. The project contests are as follows:

  • Best school projectfor students who are still at secondary school or sixth form college
  • Best first year projectfor students who are in their first year of study at a UK Higher Education Institution (HEI).
  • Best second year projectfor students in their second year of study at a UK HEI (also those on an industrial year or 3rd year of a 4 year degree – basically this is for students between their first and final years).
  • Best final year undergraduateprojectfor students in their final year of study for a BA, BSc, BEng, or in the penultimate year of an MEng (this will often be the 3rd year, but may be the fourth or fifth year, if the student has taken a year abroad, year in industry, or is studying for a 4 year Scottish degree).
  • Best apprentice projectcompleted by an apprentice working in a UK company on an approved apprenticeship scheme.

The winner in each category will be awarded a cash prize of 100;application must be submitted by 15thAugust 2016.

More information at https://ossg.bcs.org/student-project-2016.


Malvern Raspberry Jam (Family & Adult Edition) – Malvern 21/10/2015

Raspberry PiInnovate Malvern in collaboration with The Pi Shop are organising an event for people to what they have done with their Raspberry Pis, or to attend and learn about the Pi hardware and software and perhaps get started on your own projects.

The event will be held on  Wednesday 21st October 2015 at Walwyn Road (near Fossil Bank), Upper Colwall, WR13 6PL, Malvern
between 7:30pm and 9:30pm.

Come to be inspired, make friends, and collaborate on new ideas. Also, if you have children attending the earlier Student Edition of the Malvern Raspberry Jam, then this is your chance to try and get ahead of them! After the session at about 9pm, people can head to either The Chase Inn or the Wyche Inn for a drink and chat.

There will be keyboards, display monitors, power, and wifi available for you to connect up your Pi. The event is free to attend, but because space is limited, we ask you to please register in advance.

(more…)


Richard Stallman talks – Lincoln 29/11/2013 and London 30/11/2013

RMS and Assange

Richard Stallman will be in UK giving one talk in the University of Lincoln (29th November) and one in London, at BitcoinExpo (30th November).

At Lincoln, Richart Stallman will be talking on “A Free Digital Society” (registration recommended). The event will take place 06:00 PM to 08:00 PM in the Jackson Lecture Theatre (MB0603), Main Admin Building (MAB), Brayford Pool Campus, University of Lincoln, Brayford Pool.

In London, he will be talking about “Software Freedom, Internet Freedom, and Bitcoin” (registration needed). The event will take place 5:20 PM to 6:20 PM at Cafe 1001, 91 Brick Lane, E1, London.

Richard Stallman is best known for launching the GNU Project in 1983, to create a “Unix-like computer operating system composed entirely of free software”. This is the foundation of Linux as we know it (or more correctly, GNU/Linux). Today, he continues his work with the GNU Project and the Free Software Foundation.


Volunteers needed for the Open Source SG

Help wanted

Would you consider helping your Specialist Group to provide a full and varied programme for BCS members and the public?

The Open Source SG of BCS is also looking for volunteers to assist with the running of the SG, which includes its events programme. There are a variety of duties available for everyone no matter how much time you are able to give.

Becoming a volunteer for BCS is a great way to expand on your CV, as well as providing a service for local members.

If you have an interest in helping the BCS Open Source Specialist Group by volunteering your services, then please contact the Member Groups Team on groups@hq.bcs.org.uk for more information on the roles available.


Public Funds in the UK: Open Source for Document and Content Management? – London 07/01/10 1

Is Open Source a viable way for the public sector to contain its IT costs?  Government policy is gradually becoming more favourable to open source (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7910110.stm).  Many commentators identify open source as a way to contain spiralling project costs (e.g. http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/aug/07/local-government-open-source-birmingham-website-costs).  Yet much of this discussion is driven by underlying agendas: it contains as much disinformation as realistic appraisal of the capabilities of open source software.

The BCS Open Source Specialist Group is organising an event to look at the reality behind the rhetoric.  Responding to the challenge in the above Guardian article, we aim to bring together a group of information management practitioners and vendors to discuss their experience of web and document management in the public sector.  The event will consist of a series of talks, panel sessions and open discussion of the challenges of web and document management in the public sector, and the ways in which open source software might be suitable for addressing these challenges.

The event will be held at the BCS Central London Offices, First Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London WC2E 7HA (http://www.bcs.org/upload/pdf/london-office-guide.pdf)) on Thursday 7th January, 2010, from 10.00 to 17.30.

There will be no fee to participate in this event and a free buffet and refreshments will be available during the day.

To book a place to attend this event please contact Mark Elkins via mark_elkins@bcs.org

Agenda

10.00     Introduction

10.15     Mike Davis (Ovum)

10.45     Matt Hamilton (Netsight)

11.15     break

11.30    John Newton (Alfresco)

12.00    Mike Grafham (Deloitte)

12.30    Jon Marks (LBi)

13.00    lunch

13.45    Danny Budzak (Newham case study)

14.15    John Lindsay (Kingston University)

14.45    Francois Mounier (Camden case study)

15.15    break

15.30    Tjeerd Brenninkmeijer (Hippo)

16.00    Janus Boye (J.Boye)

16.30    break

16.45    Panel Session (all speakers)

Speakers

Mike Davis is a Senior Analyst with Ovum covering the breadth of Information Management technologies, with a particular focus on information discovery and access.  As a consultant, researcher and accomplished speaker, Mike’s analysis and strategic advice is highly respected in both blue chip businesses and large public sector organisations across Europe and the Asia-Pacific region.

Since joining Ovum Mike has established himself as a key influencer and commentator in the areas of Content Management and Information Access, through reports, speaking and consultancy.  Before Ovum, he worked at Butler Group for six years leading the Knowledge Management and Public Sector practices, developing particular expertise in the areas of Enterprise Portals, Business Intelligence, Compliance, and Records Management.

Mike’s career prior to becoming an analyst was principally in the UK National Health Service, but he also spent periods as an IT consultant and as the IT Manager for an International Chartered Institute.  During his seventeen years in the NHS, Mike was both an operational manager for community health care services, and latterly an Information Services Director, acting as a key advisor on regional and national initiatives.

Mike is frequent speaker at conferences and Master Classes across Europe and in Asia Pacific, and provides comments for both mainstream media such as the Financial Times and CNBC, and the specialist computing press.  Mike gained an MBA in 1998; he describes himself as a strategist with a passion for management, and flair for information.

Matt Hamilton is Technical Director of Netsight Internet Solutions a Plone development company based in Bristol, UK.  He is generally involved in Plone consulting on scalability, authentication and integration of Plone in the enterprise.  He organised the Plone performance sprint in Bristol in 2008.  Matt served on the founding board of the Plone Foundation, and is currently serving in his third term on the board.

John Newton is CTO and Chairman of Alfresco, an open source content management system founded in 2005 and now the largest private open source company.  John has spent the last 25 years building information management software, including co-founding Documentum, the enterprise content management company in 1990.  John started his career as one of the original engineers at Ingres and ultimately ran the database group.  John was also one of the first entrepreneurs in residence in Europe at Benchmark Capital.  John graduated with a BS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC Berkeley.

Mike Grafham has worked in the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) industry since 2001, and is currently a Manager in Deloitte’s ECM consultancy practice.  He has experienced a wide range of ECM engagements in both the public and private sectors, using both commercial and open source products.  Most recently, Mike has been working on an open source WCMS implementation with one client, alongside a commercial WCMS implementation with another, and will be able to provide his views from this unique perspective.

Jon Marks has been working in the Web industry since 1995.  He has been directly involved in over 50 CMS implementations including systems such as Vignette, Interwoven, Tridion, MOSS, Fatwire, MediaSurface and EPiServer, as well as many search engines and analytics suites.  He is particularly interested in the vendor selection and partner selection process, and how to build a long and trusting relationship between the parties involved.  Jon is currently Head of Development for LBi UK (www.lbi.co.uk).

Danny Budzak has been working with technologies since they were ‘new’. He started by building community information databases across a library network in east London using videotext.  He then became one of the country’s first local authority web editors and won a New Statesmen New Media award in 1999.  For the past six years he’s been working as an independent consultant in information management and governance. He helped to build an open source community history site – http://www.newhamstory.com/.

This is using the Drupal content management system and enables people to publish stories, photographs and comments about local history.  The site has been live for 18 months and has over 400 users.  Users can tag their content using either a controlled vocabulary, or can add their own tags.  The use of tagging enables content to be collated around time, place and subject and helps the users see new patterns in the information.  Within the Drupal system, the tagging is also supporting the overall information architecture of the site, helping to create dynamic a-z lists and directories to further enhance search and retrieval.

He is now working on a second project, North East Stories – http://www.northeaststories.com/ – a local history project in the north east of England. Danny continues to be fascinated and infuriated by technologies, people and systems in equal measure and records his thoughts at http://www.artofgov.com/

John Lindsay is Reader in Information Systems Design at Kingston University.  He has been following the adventures of public sector development of electronic governance for about thirty years and has continually been puzzled by the sorts of decisions which are taken by a broad range of interested parties, particularly those with a professional obligation as well as those of a political, economic, social and technological bent.

Part of the story might be told in the introductory paragraph for the meeting, “containing IT costs”? Is this really what is driving thinking?  If we are trying to make sense of technology and its social application to government, what sort of concepts and methods do we need? Open source is one of these, which is not the same as open access, nor does it mean free. Instead what we might have is a fundamental change in the obligations of citizenship?

Francois Mounier. As Integration and development manager at London borough of Camden, Francois is the technical lead on many of the transformation agenda programmes within Camden including e-channel and integration strands.  He has been evangelising the use of open standards within Camden as one of the critical success factors of current and future developments. He started his career as a developer with a background in web analytics.

Tjeerd Brenninkmeijer co-founded Hippo with Arjé Cahn & Jeroen Verberg.  He founded Hippo in 1999 to help organizations & governments leverage open source Content Management and Portal technologies to manage and access information, protect sensitive data, share knowledge, optimize collaboration and reduce operational costs.  Hippo was recognized by Deloitte in its Fast 500 for 2007, 2008 and 2009.  To keep up with the rapid expansion, Hippo now has over 50 employees located in its European headquarters in Amsterdam, The Netherlands and North American headquarters in San Francisco, California.  Travelling between between the Hippo offices & conferences around the globe, you can always find Tjeerd carrying around his kite-surfing gear to try & find new undiscovered spots with lots of wind.

Janus Boye is founder and managing director of J.Boye (www.jboye.com).  He is a busy and productive author, covering topics such as intranet, CMS, and web strategy, and has contributed to several CMS Watch reports, including The Web CMS Report, Enterprise Portals Report and Enterprise Social Software and Collaboration Report.  Janus is a frequent speaker at industry events and the chairman of the internationally recognised J.Boye Conferences held each year in Aarhus, Denmark, and Philadelphia, US.


Accelerating Enterprise adoption of Open Source Software – London 05/10/09

Register at http://btosaccelerate.eventbrite.com/

You’ve heard about the economic and technical benefits of open source software, and perhaps even made the decision to go with open source-based solutions. But you are also aware of some big issues that need to be addressed, perhaps framed by a degree of fear, uncertainty and doubt.

You might be unsure as to what support options are available. You may have concerns about Intellectual Property indemnification. And you’ve possibly read of cases where people have fallen foul of the licensing conditions attached to open source software.

For sure, Open Source Software presents enterprises with an unprecedented range of benefits. But with it come considerations and obligations: support, Intellectual Property and licensing amongst them. These need not be onerous, but you need to have a good, thorough understanding of them and the implications.

This conference will cover these key issues about open source software and will show how enterprises can accelerate effective and appropriate adoption.

BT has joined forces with Canonical (the creators of the market leading desktop Linux distribution), IBM and Moorcrofts LLP to bring you a full agenda that is designed to be both enlightening and practical. Speakers will include Mark Shuttleworth, the CEO of Canonical and founder of Ubuntu Linux, Adam Jollans, Open Source Strategy Manager at IBM, and JP Rangaswami, BT’s Chief Scientist, as well as Andrew Katz, Partner at Moorcrofts LLP. There will also be a panel Q&A session chaired by long-time open source expert and author, Glyn Moody.

It’s a great line up and we hope you will be able to join us.

Kind regards,

Jeremy Ruston, Head of Open Source Innovation, BT.