I had the pleasure of attending the Open World Forum recently, where I got to represent a new FP7 project on open source called ICT PROSE.
OWF itself really opened up my eyes to the activities happening around Europe in regards to open source in the enterprise. An overview of what I got up to is on the TSSG review of OWF12, and the rest of this post is a cross post of what I’ve written with Roberto Galoppini on behalf of the ICT PROSE project.
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Can projects and organisations keep full control of their data in open source forges? This was one of the key questions asked during the recent Open Forges Summit, part of the Open World Forum 2012*, held in Paris. With Roberto Galoppini (Geeknet) as Track Chair, and Miguel Ponce de Leon (TSSG) presenting, the PROSE project had some insights to present on the matter.
As part of the summit Roberto introduced participants to the changed landscape for source forges.
From there Ross Gardler of the Apache Software Foundation highighted how forges, today, don’t make it easy to discover the individuals and the communities behind the software and he made some suggestions (around the humble honey bee) on how forges could improve the way forge users could discover the important people and communities behind open source projects.
Scott Wilson of OSS Watch showed how its possible to bridge the gap between open source development processes and app stores, particularly in the case for mobile apps – but he pondered the question on how this could be applied to other kinds of software.
Stijin Goedertier of the ADMS Working Group outlined the future plans for the AMDS.SW metadata vocabulary which is used by JoinUp to describe open source software in the forge, making it possible to more easily explore, find, and link open source software on the web.
Olivier Berger & Christian Bayle of FusionForge did a integrated presentation on the advances of interoperability of FLOSS forges from the COCLICO projects.
Miguel then shared the goals of the ICT PROSE project. Through the presentation “Empowering FLOSS in European Projects” Miguel informed the audience of the PROSE project whose objective is to accelerate the adoption of open source software on EU ICT projects. The presentation highlighted the projects plans to increase the lifetime of the software developed inside European projects and thus maximizing projects’ impacts. The presentation showed the creation and management of a platform for FLOSS project management, the development of a training program on legal and business aspects pertaining to FLOSS adoption and provided insight on a dissemination program to promote the adoption of a FLOSS-driven model in EU ICT projects.
Finally the summit concluded with Laurent Charles on behalf of Enalean, highlighting how faster innovation was achieved by them with the Tuleap forge, and how customers quickly understood the gains: more contributions, exchanges, quality developments that really match their needs while staying free and independent.
Clearly there are new opportunities on how to allow projects to keep full control over their data in open source forges and new initiatives that the EU is driving have started to address the issues.
The Open World Forum is the leading global summit meeting bringing together decision-makers, communities and developers to cross-fertilize open technological, economic and social initiatives, in order to build the digital future. The event was founded in 2008, and now takes place every year in Paris, with over 180 speakers from 40 countries, an international audience of 1,900 delegates in 2011.
