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The jury's decision is unanimous: 'We want more comfortable stools.'Series of ribbons, one of which reads 'I wandered in here by mistake and now I'm paralyzed by fear.'

Cartoon-blogging from OSCON

Cartoon-blogging from OSCON published on 2 Comments on Cartoon-blogging from OSCON

Howdy, folks – I’m in Portland, OR at OSCON: O’Reilly Media’s annual gathering for the open-source community.

The convention itself starts tomorrow, but there have already been two days of tutorials and summits. I caught today’s cloud computing summit, which included a series of debates with a jury deciding such issues as whether open APIs prevent lock-in, whether we need standards in The Cloud, and whether the tarsier is a cute mascot or the cutest mascot.

The jury's decision is unanimous: 'We want more comfortable stools.'

One little touch that I love: the ribbons you can add to your badge. With most conventions, that’s fully in the control of the organizers: you get a ribbon that says “Sponsor” or “Speaker” or “VIP” if and only if you merit it. At OSCON, you get your choice of everything from “Database Doctor” to “We’re Hiring”… or a blank ribbon and a Sharpie.

Series of ribbons, one of which reads 'I wandered in here by mistake and now I'm paralyzed by fear.'

There’s no question, though, that this conference’s main target audience is people whose tech chops exceed mine by a light year or so. That’s great – I like to feel challenged, and there’s no question most of the sessions I’m attending will do just that. And that makes me especially delighted that Alex and I will be presenting tomorrow on how we’ve been taking Social Signal’s business processes open, and the surprises, pitfalls and windfalls that we’ve encountered.

More coming tomorrow.

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