If last year’s inaugural All Things Open (ATO) conference in Raleigh was primarily an event for developers and admins, that’ll be even more true when ATO II cranks up on October 22 at the Raleigh Convention Center. At least that’s how it appears when scanning the tentative schedule posted on the ATO website. There’s also much on tap for management types, but the main focus is on developers and system administrators.
At first glance, it might look as if there’s very little for what blogger Gary Newell calls the Everyday Linux User, those who have adopted free software at home or in a mom and pop business. To my eyes, there is barely enough — but that still qualifies as enough.
That might change. The schedule is still tentative and very much in flux. There are no descriptions of the presentations posted yet and there were still a few slots that remain unfilled, presumably waiting on schedule confirmations. However, the presentations’ names are usually descriptive enough and there are bios of all speakers, making it easy enough to get some sort of idea of what to expect.
For now, my my personal list of what I want to see is even more tentative than the official ATO schedule. Until the descriptions go up, I can only imagine and guess at what the presentations will cover. For instance, there is a presentation scheduled in the Design category for the second hour on the conference’s first day with the hopeful title “Designing for Different Audiences – Community Versus Enterprise.” Although this sounds promising, there’s no named speaker yet, which means no organization connection to offer a clue as to what will be covered in this workshop.
Nevertheless, there are more than a couple of things that are already “gotta sees” for me. During Wednesday’s second hour, for example, there’s a presentation under the “Open Government/Open Data” thread called “Software Development as a Civic Service,” being conducted Ben Balter, who is identified as “a Government Evangelist at GitHub.” Evidently he’s something of a lobbyist for open standards and open source. He’s also a DC attorney, meaning he’s probably somebody good to have on our side.
