[[ I was at rather long-windedly titled Open Standards/Open Source for National and Local eGovernment Programs in the U.S. and EU conference today. Here's an overview of what I did today. More notes later.]]
5:30am alarm goes off. We want to leave early, and I think it's 6am or so. The weather update at 5:33 was rather jarring.
6:00am after half an hour of trying to muster up the initiative to get out of bed, it's time to hit the shower and get ready for the day.
6:30ish hit the back roads and deal with the "traffic" instead of hitting I-95/the Beltway which will be way more congested this time of the morning.
7ish Get on the metro at Greenbelt. Destination: Foggy Bottom.
7:45ish Bump into someone from the Census Bureau on the escalator from the metro, also going to the conference at GWU today.
7:50ish Pick up badges at the registration desk, and the family reunion begins. Bradley Kuhn was able to make it in from Boston. (The FSF has no formal statement on the protest planned by NYLXS because Microsoft was invited to speak). Lots of Feds around, and many of the private sector types that are either bidding on gov't contracts, or have success stories using open source to discuss.
Talk to Janina Sajka from the America Foundation for the Blind about Jouke's work with pVoice. Janina mentions that there's an upcoming conference on electronic audio books coming up next month in the Netherlands. All of the relevant specs are now open standards, and it looks like the format is finally ready to take off.
8:30 Time for the opening talks. Diane Martin and Tony Stanco from CSPRI have a few opening remarks, and finish with lots of time to spare. So we take a vote and Whitfield Diffie starts his talk early. (Somehow Whammo managed to make it to the conference this week. This is somewhat suprising given the nature of world affairs...)
9:00 A few people start to wander in from the other opening remarks, and Diffie makes some noises about starting his presentation again. :-) Diffie makes some very interesting points about security and how it relates to open source vs. closed software based on first principles from cryptography.
9:45 Terry Bollinger from MITRE is a last minute (re-)addition to the program. He's presenting a slightly updated version of his FOSS in the DoD report. Thankfully, Terry still has a job with MITRE. This is a little surprising given the rumors of pressure that a certain rather large proprietary software vendor has put on the DoD and its agents in publicizing its use of Open Source...
10:30 Break time. The NYLXS protesters are here, and some of them are registered. All of them are dressed in French Revolutionary garb, down to the Nikes on their feet. They're handing out some flyers I think, but somehow I don't get one, nor do they try and convince me that this event is evil because Microsoft was invited. About six security guards are present to handle the disturbance these five individuals present. Some of the protesters are even registered, and in the end, the facilities staff determine that although this conference center is private property, the protesters can remain unless they cause a disturbance. (Must be a massively effective protest if they are not disrupting the conference...they're gone by lunchtime)
11:00am Robert Lefkowitz's talk is a lot of material I haven't heard him present before. He is the guy at Merrill Lynch who talks about Free Rides vs. Free Markets, not Free Speech vs. Free Beer. This time, he's talking about how Open Source increases liquidity, fungibility, standardization and virtualization. Lots of good material here. Unfortunately, ML does not allow distribution of soft copies of presenter's slides...
11:45am Stacey Quandt from Giga talks about some instances where governments are switching to open source. There's some handwaiving about TCO and ROI here. Most of the case studies are about switching from SomeApp+HP/UX to SomeApp+Linux on x86 or Linux on a zSeries. Someone in the audience is assiduously taking notes on his WinXP Tablet PC. He later confesses that he does indeed work for Microsoft.
Tasty Lunch at Bombay Palace on K St.
2pm Ian Murdoch (yes, the Ian from Debian) talks about Linux as a platform vs. Linux as a product. His new company, Progeny is making software for creating Linux distributions. At first, it sounds like folly, but Ian made some very important points that make this sound like a legitimate need for many companies before they deploy Linux widely.
2:45pm Time to get some real coffee. Stop by Starbucks on 18th St. and load up an article for Phil Windley to read.
3:30pm Return from Starbucks in time to mingle at the afternoon break. Phil confirms that the article in SD Mag is a complete wash, full of inaccuracies printed elsewhere in the local Utah media. Bump into Mary Ann Fischer from IBM, Bruce Perens, and some other globetrotters. Talk to Peter Loscocco from NSA about SE Linux (during Robert Watson's TrustedBSD talk...bad timing on my part). Peter clarifies a few issues with the GPL, SE Linux, and the disgusting nature of US Federal Contracts.
5:30pm Show up for Phil Windley's talk on issues a CIO encounters. News Flash: the apps and servers that are burning up in flames are more important than getting Open Source into the organization. Governments work slowly (for a lot of good and bad reasons), and sometimes the best thing you can do is get open source software (Apache, Samba, JBoss, Linux) on the list of "approved technologies" for new projects. This helps level the playing field, and doesn't draw as much fire as legislating a requirement to use open source, or legislating the level playing field.
6:30pm Show up for the reception upstairs and mingle some more. (Tell Michael Tiemann that he is all three founders of Cygnus Software.)
8pm Watch W. give his pre-declaration of War on Iraq. It looks like war will not start until the end of this conference.
8:30pm Wend our way home. Wait for two infrequent-running Metro trains.
10pm Get home, feed the cat, and channel surf between ABC's non-stop coverage of the war-to-be, the ongoing PBS documentary about Iraq, and the usual stock of Monday Night Murder Dramas.
11:30pmThe postponed 11pm news is now on the air. More than half the weather report is about the weather in Iraq, when the moon changes phases. There's a storm system developing that could drop a bunch of snow on the Iraqi Mountains over Colorado. (Someone had too much Guinness before the weathercast today...)
Some idiot drove his Jeep into a pond on the mall, got out, and drove his tractor into the pond and drove around the water for over eight hours today. Constitution Ave. was closed for a while as well. Apparently, the idiot has caused a standoff is a Vietnam Veteran and a tobacco farmer, and has some issues with tobacco subsidies...Somehow, I don't think his grevances are a priority right now.
It's been a looong day...
Re:Tractor
ziggy on 2003-03-18T20:27:33
The morning radio show indicated that the "explosives" in question might be a heaping pile of fertilizer, a la Tim McVey. Somehow, I don't think that a pile of fertilizer will be able to raze a below-ground reflecting pool......he claims to have explosives
Re:real coffee
ziggy on 2003-03-18T20:33:25
Trust me, I know where to find real coffee. The coffee urns at the event were dispensing a vile, lukewarm, possibly caffeinated and very thin liquid that was mildly flavored with something vaguely resembling charcoal food coloring. Standard baseline catering fare, and hardly drinkable. Maxwell House instant would have been a step up...Someday I'll have to show you real coffee, if I'm ever able to produce it. Thin milky charred black liquid does not real coffee make.Starbucks, on the other hand, is not great, but at least it is a known quantity. Even a poorly run shop still makes a standardized, recognizeable product. I'm not happy about it, but at least it's easy to find, and it has good WiFi.
