OSS Watch team blog

Sadly I wasn’t able to attend the Oxford barcamp this weekend, but looking at the first online reactions it seems this was a great success. About 50 people attended, traveling from as far as Glasgow, with a few representatives from Italy and the west coast of the US.

As Ross mentioned earlier, the aim of this event co-organized by OSS Watch was to provide an opportunity for developers, academics, members of the Apache Software Foundation, IT students and other people involved in the computing and  technology fields to meet informally and find out about their open source related projects.

According to the schedule as of 1pm on Sunday, the topics for discussion included ‘agile management and open source’, ‘aggregating university content on  iTunes’, ‘open ID, ‘the Apache way’, ‘cyberactivism’, ‘open font libraries’, and ‘emotional intelligence as management style’. The participants also had a chance to admire Oxford’s famous ‘dreaming spires’ featured on the barcamp’s cool mugs, and apparently there was even time for a few gigs.

While we wait for a proper assessment of the event, first impressions have already been published by Marcus Povey, Ben Werdmuller and Sylwia Presley. Andrew Luke wrote about the discrete branding of the event and commented on a few sessions on Mapping CCTV and transparency, Cyberactivism, Geomaps and data, Wikis and collaboration and Facebook. Aidan Skinner posted his love notes to Open ID in the barcamp wiki.

I think I would have particularly enjoyed the open and agile development session led by Marco Abis and Gianugo Rabellino from Sourcesense. In his post on the session Marco mentioned the 12 principles behind the Agile Manifesto and suggested that a key term to consider when comparing agile and open development is the customer, referred to in the very first Agile principle.

[…] one of the reasons why it’s so hard to adopt Agile fully – whatever that means – in a typical Open Source project can be nailed down to one single word in the first principle:

“Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.”

As there isn’t necessarily a customer in the common sense of the term. It might be a whole community, the single developers working on the project or something else entirely.

Apparently a conversation on this topic has started on the barcamp’s twitter channel, and Ross mentioned that a number of UK academics and industry folk agreed to collaborate on a document comparing the Agile principles to the (as yet undefined) principles of open development.