Why FOSDEM is important to Government CIOs (and other enterprises)

This is my fourth year going to the free and open source developer European meeting known as FOSDEM.   I'm pretty sure that other than my colleague, no other American government civilian has attended it during this time (if I’m wrong please get in touch).  But I’d like to tell you why it matters, why FOSDEM, is something every CIO\CTO in and outside of government should know and care about.

FOSDEM is a chaotic meeting of mostly young (average age is about 24 or so), mostly male (about 15 to 1 male to female), mostly European open (its in Europe - but its estimated that about 70% of FLOSS developers are European, though most end up working in the United States - recently i heard that this study was not a very good one so please take these numbers as purely anectdotal)  source developers and aficionados. 

This year there were about 5000 folks there.   You can see the logo on the t shirts that beer and sftware are closely related.  Its pretty true, lots of cheap beer to go around at a euro fifty a juliper, its in Belgium after all and on a college campus.  Its  projects ranged from embedded linux to ada to mozilla all in all 265 speakers - The conference has a simple premise:  Get students to volunteer to organize it, get rooms, set up wifi, and let the presentations begin.  This year they got the WIFI network up at the last moment as they did the year before and the year before that.

If you cant read code, or aren't fluent in geekery, FOSDEM presentations may seem less than comprehensible.  Coding practices for security, showcases of projects, design considerations, pleas for recruitment, presentation of tools used in the latest start-up are all typical themes.

So why should DoD or any enterprise care?  Its just a bunch of mostly poorly dressed geeks talking about their hobbies after all.  It is that.  It also an example of where the innovation happens and how it has matured over time.  Its where new specifications get defined for the 10 year old protocol known as XMPP, formerly known as jabber,  adopted by google and soon to be extended  to the JINGLE protocol.  Its where the guy who originally architected twitter and fireeagle, hangs out with his friends. Its where tribes like drupal first coalesced 4 years ago and turned 30 people in a room into 1500 (sold out a month in advance) for a conference on the other side of the planet. 

FOSDEM is generative networks made visible in the flesh.  The mess the diversity and the innovation, the bad haircuts.

Its not a coincidence that more and more liaisons for large companies end up having people there.  And more and more these relationships are becoming part of corporate, cooperative strategies.  Savvy organizations know that they can’t wait to engage and understand these generative networks unless they are willing to be a consumers of others innovations, or have their products be squeezed out of innovation nets by more accessible alternatives. 

Finding a way to contribute and participating is the only way to shape one’s role in the technologies that will eventually end up on your pc, running your websites, on your servers virtual machines, on your service providers infrastructure, used by your banker,  or on your mobile handset.  And these technologies will end up inside your enterprise firewall as well.  Understanding FOSDEM and the generative networks it makes visible is about understanding and defining your place in the new supply chains for codifying innovation.