Developers might be really interested in an event that is being run by OSS Watch, called Engaging Developers with Open Source Projects Workshop, on Friday 9th October, 2009 in Oxford between 0930 and 1630.
The event is free and to book your place, please visit the event website for further information and a booking form.
(Tag for the event is #deveng09)
The workshop will attempt to explain how developers engaged in making modifications, customisations and amendments to open source software might make their contributions to a project. There are three main speakers:
Scott Wilson – will be talking about Wookie – an open source Widget engine (based on the W3C Widgets specification) and a number of plugins for popular web applications such as Wordpress.
Dr Ian Botson – will give an account of how the Sakai project engages with open source communities. Ian will argue that using open source is very easy. However, what is harder is influencing a sustainable community based on merit and he will contend that this really requires a different way of thinking. Ian will also talk about his involvment in the devlopment of Sakai 3, the decisions and dilemmas it gave him and how this led to his involvement in Apache.
Mark Johnson will give an overview of his involvement in the core development of Moodle and discuss the advantages of this process to a developer, their respective employer, and the developer community as a whole, see:
The event will end with a plenary session and conclusion.
Paul Walk will be attending from DevCSI together with blogger and journalist Michelle Pauli. We hope to provide a report of the event which may include some interviews with some key people via this blog.
A very useful reading list has been provided by the event organisers.
There will also be a live blog on the day to cover the event.
If any of you reading this end up going to the event, it would be great to hear your thoughts and feedback of what you hear via the event blog, your own blog, tweets, other kinds of web postings, or even as a reply to this posting.