The conference has been divided into two section, the first titled An open digital market as a catalyst for economic growth. Prof.  Bruno van Pottelsberghe have open the session with his presentation about open innovation being a driver of economic growth. He stresses the fact that Europe could be a potential leader in the innovation field. His remark about expensive patent system in Europe made noise in the audience – I have to disagree on this point with Prof Pottlesberghe too, even if he’s “teaching it”.  David Drummond, Senior VP Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer from Google followed with his presentation about what Google thinks of open standards. In his opinion open standards are important for the future internet and openness will win. He speculated about the new Google slogan “Mobile First” and assured us with smile that “Don’t evil” still applies. In my personal opinion his presentation had mostly marketing feel, which was case for other presentations from Corporations attendees. After a short break Don Deutsh, Vice President, Standards Strategy and Architecture for Oracle Corporation opened his presentation about hearth moving story of a small company that grown well thanks to openness, of course this small company was renamed from SDL to Oracle later on. “Open standards are in Oracle’s DNA” made me smile a little. One of the people I’ve been looking forward to hear is Rishab Aiyer Ghosh from UNU-MERIT in Maastricht. Rishab’s reputation precedes him, he’s doing a great research work, some of it is visible at Open Source Observatory and Repository. His presentation was entertaining as he compared how innovative technologies helps penguins to survive, he notes that competition in natural selection is constant and free. He demonstrated how patents are blocking the innovation with an example of steam engine efficiency. We’ve closed the morning session with Prof. Yochai Benkler from Berkman Center for Internet and Society. In his presentation, Prof. Benkler reminds us how wikipedia way beat proprietary encyclopaedias such as Encarta or Britcannica. Later on he expended his thought about networked information economy and how it supports innovation. “You shouldn’t need a permission to innovate” he says. He presented elaborate questions about EU Digital Agenda to the end of this presentation.

After nice and social lunch the second session Delivering truly open e-government and digital citizenship began. Professor Nigel Shadbolt presented an effort of the UK government on transparency and open data. He demonstrated the power of the public data with two examples, a map of cholera cases and a map of bicycling traffic accidents in London. Prof. Shadbolt is working on data.gov.uk to define single point of access for all public UK data using open and common standards for delivery. The inner geek in me appreciated the details about its technical implementation with help of SPARQL. He clearly showed how public is willing to use this data and build upon. I personally rate this as the most interesting presentation at the conference. Oh, I wish one day we will have such open and easy access to public data in Europe or even world-wide. For this we need our leaders to actively support and implement e-governments. Next, Thomas Vinje from Partner Clifford Change talked about open procurement of ICT in the EU public sector. Very clear about legislative framework that’s in place and how a tender notice should look like, sadly I think we are far from this in Slovak Republic (thanks Robo). He finished his presentation with ten suggestions to governments for ICT standards-based procurement policies. Michael Karasick from IBM presented on Cloud and why it must be open and IBM is working with Microsoft to define openness of the future, ehm. Nice to see that corporations finally understands that open standards are a must for success. As next, Jerry Rishenden from Centre for Technology Policy Research in UK spoken about e-government and changes needed to accommodate true digital citizenship in the UK. I’m very happy to see such participation on these issues from UK side, they’re on a good direction and hopefully will lead other countries such as Slovak Republic. As the last presenter, Peter Strickx from FEDICT public services in Belgium explained how they are trying to modernize Belgium Federal administration with openness. Interesting enough their federal applications must be certified working on Open Source stack (for example Apache, Jboss, Mysql) even if they will run on proprietary solutions (contra-example BEA, Oracle 11g).

The conference closed with a panel discussion, interesting and to some extend trolling. Mr. from IBM decided to ignore potentially hard question about open standards of their hardware. We finished the conference with private dinner and beers as to be expected in Belgium. I will update this post with session recordings as soon as OFE publishes them.

• OpenForum Europe Summit 2010
• Karsten Gerloff’s view on the event
• Presentations and videos from the conference

More information on WavesFromSpace.org.

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/DeveloperConference2009

If you want to start the drive in standby:

sdparm –command=start /dev/sdb

To clean standby mode flag:

sdparm –clear STANDBY -6 /dev/sdb && sdparm -a /dev/sdb