Vancouver Open Source Week – the dawn of something new

Open Source software and solutions is on the rise. From being a fringe element of the programming community supported mainly by geeks and ignored by big business, the last few years have seen Open Source become a force to be reckoned with as a true competitor to expensive proprietary solutions. Why? Because of the community.

The weird thing about Open Source though, and the thing that could ultimately stifle its progress to becoming the go-to solution for everyone, is that each community is almost religiously devoted to their particular solution. You have the Drupal crew, the WordPress crew, the Joomla crew, the JS crews (there are several – one for JS proper and one for each of the many libraries), the PHP crew, the Rails crew not to mention the Python crew and now also the Open-Source-On-.NET crews like Dot Net Nuke and Umbraco. And even though they all work with the same obstacles and challenges, they tend to isolate themselves and act as if they have the One True Application. At times they even fight one another writing off the other solutions as knockoffs or inferior products.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Vancouver Open Source Week – the conversation begins

You may have wondered why WordCamp:Developers is happening on a Thursday and not the weekend. The answer is simple: WordCamp:Developers is part of the first ever Vancouver Open Source Week. In fact, our event is one of several interesting Open Source events that first week of May: A Joomla User Group  Meet-Up Tuesday evening, a Drupal evening mixer Wednesday evening, our very own WordCamp:Developers as well as a Linux User Group meeting on Thursday and a very cool afternoon on Open Data and Interoperability hosted by The Museum of Vancouver on Friday.

Vancouver Open Source Week was kickstarted by Microsoft Canada and leads up to the huge one-day Open Source conference Make Web Not War on Saturday May 7th. The event also features a huge coding competition called Code Your Art Out that pairs web designers and developers with non-profit organizations to find new and creative online solutions to reach more people. And as you can see from our sidebar Make Web Not War is one of the key sponsors for our event ensuring that ticket prices are low and everyone gets to experience a day of WordPress goodness.

Tickets for Make Web Not War are already sold out but those that were lucky enough to get on the list are in for a treat. Morten spoke at Make Web Not War in Montreal in 2010 and made it his mission to bring the event to Vancouver in 2011 so the Vancouver Open Source community could experience it for themselves.

You may think it’s strange that Microsoft, a company that makes its money selling proprietary solutions, is hosting an Open Source conference and even helping support a week of Open Source events, but speaking to the Microsoft Canada crew, and especially the key organizers of the event, it makes perfect sense: You could say we, the Open Source community, won the battle. And rather than fighting us Microsoft has decided to start contributing and supporting us. That means extended support for Open Source on their server platforms, heavy involvement in th W3C and a new and strict focus on web standards and even contributions to popular Open Source tools like the JQuery JavaScript library.

These are exciting times and we should all take part.

Let’s make it matter!

Like I said, this is the first ever Vancouver Open Source Week, and as such it’s a bit of an experiment. That means we, the community, is in a unique position to frame the conversation for the future. Let’s take this opportunity to start something and make it matter. Vancouver Open Source Week 2011 should be the first of many. We should make it an annual event. In fact we should make it the annual event for anyone working in Open Source. Imagine a full week of big Open Source conferences and our fair city filled of thinkers, doers and thought leaders focussed on one common goal: Making the web open. It can be done and the work starts right now!