Another year has passed by in a flash and OSCON, O’Reilly’s annual open source convention, is upon us. Fellow 451 open source analyst and Portlander, Jay Lyman, will be with me all week at the Oregon Convention Center to check the pulse of the open source development community, meet with vendors and clients, reconnect with old friends, and count utilikilts (among many other things). It was my first trip to OSCON in 2005 that got me hooked on both the conference and the city. Now, heading into my fourth year at OSCON and my third year as a Portland resident, I’ll take the short commute tomorrow morning. Welcome back to Portland, “open sourcerors”!

Monday starts off with a packed schedule. I was asked just over a month ago to co-chair O’Reilly’s new Open Mobile Exchange day conference with Surj Patel of GigaOm (and former O’Reilly ETel conference chair). The topics surrounding open source and mobile are very exciting and there’s much to talk about. We’ve been racing to finalize speakers and the day-long agenda for this inaugural event. We have some great speakers lined up and I am looking forward to the presentations and open discussions. I hope to see some of you there. In the evening, I’ll be at a public talk by Mark Shuttleworth on Ubuntu and space travel. We’re expecting perhaps 200 people, and I am very pleased that Mark accepted an invitation to speak the night before he’s doing the OSCON keynote.

Tuesday is full of meetings - a Microsoft roundtable all morning, followed by a panel discussion at Collaborative Software Initiative with Wilf Pinfold (Intel), Dan Frye (IBM), Sam Ramji (Microsoft), and myself in the afternoon. Tuesday evening marks the start of OSCON with the keynote by Mark Shuttleworth, the Google / O’Reilly Open Source Awards, and a talk by Robert “r0ml” Lefkowitz on ‘exceptional software.’

It’s on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday that I’ll be able to attend a variety of interesting talks on the state of open source, some technical, others social. That is, when I am not busy with meetings. Every year I end up spending more of my time in the hallways sitting at tables for meetings than I do in the conference rooms listening to speakers. Let’s see if that changes this year.

If you’re planning to be at OSCON this year and you’d like to meet, send me an email. I still have some slots available in my schedule later in the week. If you’re not at OSCON and are hoping to connect with me by phone or email, please be patient as I will probably not be able to get back to you in a timely manner this week.