POSSCON 2009
The conference is a new, free and open source software conference in Columbia, SC. This last one on April, 19th 2009 was the second one. It was held on the University of South Carolina's campus. It is a free conference! I have attended both conferences and they were both good experiences and it seems it will only get better!
What was good.The size of the conference doubled, if not tripled, this year. It is nice to see a growing interest in technology and software in a state generally not known for IT. The reasons seem to be that the word is getting out. These guys do a good job running the conference and you can not beat a free conference. :) POSSCON is also present on some popular social media sites :
Because of the larger size there was more representation for other parts of the state. Last time a few people from Charleston were there and this time there seemed to be a lot more. Same with other areas. The College Of Charleston was represented by the Common Lisp for Java project! Some people from the Charleston Linux User Group were there. Other Linux user groups from around the state were there. The South East Linux Fest was represented as well. Redhat and Fedora was there too, but they were there the first time. :)
The weather was very nice for the outdoor free lunch!
There was also a developer track. This was very nice since I am a developer. :) I really enjoyed the topic presented by Greg DeKoenigsberg about contributing to open source projects. It would be really nice if there were more South Carolinians contributing to open source.
ImprovementsThere is little that needs improvement. It seems the growth alone allows for a more diverse and interesting conference. The improvement I would like to see, is more representation of open source projects. Not in a corporate since but contributers, similar to FOSDEM. Redhat and Fedora were represented along with CL for Java, but that was it. It would be nice to have booths and topics on other projects especially SC based projects. Lightening talks would be really cool. I will say that the functional programming talks were lightening talks and done nicely. So, if we find representatives or contributers of open source projects in South Carolina or the south east it would be great if they showed up to the next POSSCON! The more the merrier. :)
I am not saying we should limit the conference to South Carolina contributers. I just would like to see more open source projects at the conference. I am also curious as to how many SC based projects or contributers are out there and it would be really cool if they all got together at POSSCON.
The South Carolina projects I know are listed here :
I know there are more and I would like to see these represented and discussed in the conferences to come.