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So this past weekend had me just outside of Cleveland, Ohio for a conference called Defrag. The stated purpose of Defrag is increasing Ohio’s involvement in “rich media” with an explicit focus on education and workforce development. And boy, they weren’t kidding. These people are serious, and great to talk to. I was there to talk about the Red Hat High program and also to give a short demo workshop on Blender. The Red Hat High presentation drew a limited, but engaging audience (there should eventually be a web video of this at some point, I think). The Blender workshop, which was part of a larger presentation on video game creation with Ted Jordan of Funutation and Steve Simmons of EDR Media, had an even more involved and diverse audience; presentations like that are always fun.

But I got a lot more out of this conference than just the ability to go on my little public displays of hyperactivity. I got to see a number of very interesting presentations by other people on a variety of cool topics. Some of the standouts for me were some of the presentations on educational game development and the presentations on open source (both the concept and the software). As part of the latter, I had the pleasure of being able to meet and briefly talk with Bruce Perens. For those of you who don’t know, he’s been involved with free and open source software from [very nearly] the beginning. We have a couple different perspectives on some topics, but by and large, I agree with him more often than I disagree.

And the presentations weren’t even the meat of what made this conference so enjoyable. The time between presentations and after the conference that was spent having discussions and tossing ideas around with other attendees was undeniably the best part of it all. Though most of the people there were from Ohio, and particularly that northeast region of the state, the attendance list for this thing ran the gamut. Because of this, I had a number stimulating conversations, and even the ones in which I could only play “fly on the wall” were quite informative.

Of course, being a young conference in its second quarterly meeting ever, there do seem to be some growing pains. In particular, one of the things that seems to be missing is a singular, cohesive vision that everyone can get behind. The conference’s website serves as a good example of what I’m talking about. There’s a lot of great information there, but some of it is difficult to find because of a flat organizational structure that doesn’t lend itself to easy navigation. A large part of the discussion of this conference was the concept of “Open Source Economic Development”. It’s true that in software, a large component of the open source development model is the “scratching of an itch”: individuals pursuing their personal interests. However, even small projects benefit from some form of organizational hierarchy when there are more than a few people involved. There’s an agreed unifying goal for the group and each person pursues their individual tasks relative to that goal, often developing sub-teams to quickly take care of low-hanging fruit. Now, to their credit, the conference is heading in that direction, so things look very promising for the folks at Defrag. It should be interesting to see how these things develop.

Anyhow, I had a great time there and I definitely look forward to the possibility of attending their next conference in July (assuming my schedule and finances hold up ;).

more at misaligned.net

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 19th, 2007 at 8:43 pm and is filed under Stuff, Turkeys. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.