Being located so close to Portland, of course we at the OSU Open Source Lab were sad to see OSCON move down to the Bay Area this year. However, it remains a great convention not only for the abundance of wonderful sessions, but for bringing together so many open source contributors from all around the world. So, even though it means a bit of traveling for us this year, we’ll be at OSCON next week – not with are usual booth in the expo hall, but we will be participating in a number of sessions.

On Wednesday at 2:35, Lance Albertson will be giving a talk entitled Server Management and Source Control: The key to scalability and teamwork. Lance leads our systems team which hosts some of the most well-known open source projects and communities in the world. Lance’s talk will give you a chance to see how we handle automation for our servers using cfengine and git to allow for all systems team members to easily collaborate and push changes to servers.

At 4:30 on Wednesday, Deborah Bryant will lead a panel entitled Bureaucrats, Technocrats and Policy Cats: How the Government is turning to Open Source, and Why. Other participants include Bjorn Freeman-Benson (DemocracyLab), Greg Lund-Chaix (OSUOSL), Clay Johnson (Sunlight Labs), and Aleksandar Totic (Open Source Digital Voting Foundation). This will be a great discussion on government moving to open source and transparency.

Thursday afternoon at 1:45 will be the much-anticipated State of Lightning Talks 2009 lead by Josh Berkus. Always informative and entertaining, the State of Lightning Talks give a handful of projects five minutes a piece to update everyone on what’s currently going on in their project & communities. Jeff Sheltren will be there to give everyone the run-down on what’s new at the Open Source Lab this year.

We look forward to seeing you there!