An open source development team in Portland, Oregon has released OpenConferenceWare, a sophisticated free package for processing event session proposals and displaying event schedules. Igal Koshevoy and Reid Beels built the system and put it on display as the scheduling system for the forthcoming Open Source Bridge conference, Portland’s response to losing the popular O’Reilly event OSCON to San Jose, California.
Events planners would be well served to check out the software; it’s not just free and extensible, it’s also quite full-featured right out of the box.
Developers familiar with UNIX and Ruby on Rails will be able to use OCW right away. Features include support for OpenID, extensive access to data and feeds, sub-events and personal, shareable schedules.
If you like the scheduling service Sched.org that was popularized at SXSW, but would like to build out an even more sophisticated system for yourself, OpenConferenceWare could be a good option. We learned about it on the Portland local tech blog Silicon Florist.
“Events scheduling 2.0” apps are not uncommon in the tech industry (Pathable is another well known cutting edge app in this market) but Koshevoy and Beels have said that their goal in making OpenConferenceWare a free and open source is “to empower other people so they can better organize and participate in more events that support free sharing of information, open society, and involved citizenry.”
A little navigation around the Open Source Bridge conference schedule shows that such a package can be not just empowering for organizers and developers, but very pleasing for users as well.
