Entrance is only a fiver and the schedule looks great. Like its predecessors (OT2005 and NotCon2004) OT2008 is “informal, low-cost”, but the slant is more towards using technology to promote and enable low-carbon and sustainable living.

I’ve also been roped into compèring one of the sessions. It’ll probably be one I know nothing about (just from looking at the running order), but the beauty about compèring as opposed to actually chairing is that you can be completely ignorant of the subject matter and nobody might ever realise. Should discussion begin to flag, I may do a little dance. That’ll be worth the entrance fee alone.

Step forward, Garrett and Victoria, to the camera and the card boxes respectively. Leaving me with more hands to dither with. Thanks, chaps.

Now. [Pats pockets]. What else have I forgotten?

Now, suddenly, it looks like being the best night so far in 2008. We’re starting with two great keynote speakers: Charlton Barreto of OASIS, W3C and Adobe, talking about the takehomes from Web 2.0; Tom Taylor of Headshift talking about the beauty of pointless mashups (such as his Twitter feeds @lowflyingrocks and @towerbridge).

There’s then a full roster of microslot talks covering a crazy range of technologies. My colleagues Matthew and Tom have answered two of the requests that the Oxford geek community themselves put out, and are doing talks on the new technologies of Comet and Google App Engine respectively; Andrew Godwin will be showing off his beautiful if computationally… trying… graphing code for Last.fm; Drew McLellan continues his simultaneous journeys through good web practice and late-70s/early-80s children’s TV shows; Simon Whitaker does some anyone-can-try-it hacking of the OSX address book; and Duncan Parkes discusses the mySociety application PlanningAlerts.

The evening will finish with a book raffle, courtesy of Friends of Ed. So if you stay for the full three hours then you’re in with a good chance of going home one book richer. Disclaimer: the venue seats 140 people and we won’t have a book for everyone.

If you’ve not stuck it in your diary yet then do so: Wednesday June 25; doors open 7.30, entrance free thanks to Torchbox and Google. I’ll be the one panicking, and hotswapping laptop monitor cables.

It was clear after the first half hour or so that there were going to be far more people there than Rob had expected: I think in the end there were around 50 to 60 attendees. A brief, slightly confusing “speed-dating” session later, I also realised that there was a real cross-section of Drupal fans there. There were freelance theme developers, module coders, hardcore sysadmins, CSSers, end users, tech writers, Drupal beginners…. A well-rounded audience, that hopefully stopped the meeting being too focussed on one layer of the CMS.

The talk from Tracy Frauzel at Greenpeace, about their experience with Drupal, was really enlightening, as was the phoned-in discussion from Joel Bassuk of Oxfam International (new site going live, 3–4 weeks’ time). It’s good to hear of people enjoying their transition from other systems to Drupal (even if the imports tend—like all data imports—to be occasionally painful).

It was also interesting to see how far people would tend to go with contributed modules, tweaking the theme and hammering away at the admin config, rather than building their own modules or (shudder) hacking core. Oxfam’s experience with forking Plone shows the perils of hacking core; to avoid doing that in Drupal, Greenpeace had used the usual locale hack to translate core strings to their liking (I say “usual”: I hadn’t seen it in the wild before, so again it was nice to hear a success story).

I really look forward to where Drupal for NGOs will go from here—maybe collaborative/accretive online conversations and resources, but most importantly the next event. This one was a really smooth first event, and it bodes well for future ones. From my experiences with the OGNs, I’ve learnt that organizing a fairly straightforward event can be incredibly stressful, and when it all works perfectly then nobody notices all the effort you’re making: that’s sort of the point of the effort, but it’s incredibly infuriating that people think you’re kicking back and feeling chilled! All the contributors, everyone who spoke or who volunteered some information, contributed to a great evening. Cheers, everyone.

Cheers, all: see you at OGN7, June 25th.

Gobion Rowlands leads our e-learning procession, with a keynote on “turning hard data into fun.” Red Redemption, Gobion’s company, has recently won an award for its online Flash game about climate change. His keynote neatly segues into microslot (5-minute) talks on e-Learning and technology in archaeology.

Meanwhile, Charlton Barreto will be discussing in his keynote what we can learn from Web 2.0. Charlton has worked with OASIS, W3C and the IEEE on related topics. But his keynote sets the ground for talks about mashups, custom CRM systems, and a possible standard for portable social-network information.

And neatly bridging the two camps of educational outreach and web-2.0 hackery is the Oxford Barcamp microslot. And although I’ll be a bag of nerves on the day, I can’t wait.

This is one of the few parts of Oxfringe ‘08 that also happened in Oxfringe ‘07, and the only one this year that I’m actually involved in. I think ‘08 organiser Andrew only asked me to be the MC because he wanted to punish me for not helping out, so: in that spirit, do come along and watch me die on my arse.

Despite the argument of what constitutes openness being largely resolved in the open-source community, we still found rich pickings of our own. It’s trivial to define openness in, say, data, with its analogies to code; but it would be an error to equate data and knowledge or understanding thereof. The broad consensus was that open knowledge was a combination of both free-as-in-speech and free-as-in-beer, but also free-as-in-educated and free-as-in-enfranchised. In this way, its analogies lie more in open computing, or open web-navigating, than in open source: a combination of freedom, autonomy and opportunity. Solutions will therefore need to be a complex, messy combination of social, political and technical: less like Python, but more like One Laptop Per Child.

Ben Spigel, who made the connection between OS-then and OK-now explicit, missed the mark a little when he likened the OK community to Linux’s. After this conference, I think we need to stretch even further back, to such early efforts as the FSF and GNU. There are still moral complexities to be resolved, difficult decisions about direction to be made, and occasionally vehement arguments to be had: only once all that is settled can we sit back and just worry about the OK equivalent of killer apps, whatever those might turn out to be.

I’m realy looking forward to it, especially in the light of one of our clients wanting to implement the OAI-PMH protocol in the next month or two. I’ll have to toss a coin, though, to see if I dare stay in London late enough to miss the last bus out from Oxford to Eynsham….

We should have something on the “official” website soon, although that currently takes a bit longer as it’s not exactly powered by a CMS. Unless you count vim as a CMS.