Today OSCON wrapped up with one last set of keynote speeches and a couple more sessions. As I’m sitting at the airport in Portland I’m reflecting on this years conference and trying to compare and contrast it to previous years. Once again the conference was loaded with informative sessions lead be the alpha geeks of the open source community. And as it happens every year, a new set of memes appears on the horizon that is bound to shape next year’s OSCON.

Many keynotes and presenters mentioned Open Data. Since there isn’t a commonly accepted definition of this term, a lot of people applied this moniker to a broad variety of concepts. Open data and open APIs were often mentioned in the same sentence and many other concepts that apply to open source were grafted onto data, acknowledging that data being open will be as powerful as open source. However, the most serious hint that open data is about to hit the big times was when Danese Cooper handed me an OSI flyer that outlined the core principles behind an open data definition. Having been trying to raise the open data meme at past OSCONs I’m pleased to see that this topic has finally risen high enough that I expect a lot more coverage of this concept next year.

I also want to applaud the OSCON program committee for accepting a much greater number of talks that focused on the community aspects of open source. Running an open source project is far from an intuitive endeavor, so I was pleased to see O’Reilly handing out the “Producing Open Source Software” book to attendees. The “How to Protect your Open Source Project from Poisonous People” and the “Art of Community” presentations I blogged about earlier were great examples of this expanded focus on community issues surrounding open source. I also found it interesting that the book and several good community presentations referenced the subversion project. I suppose this should not really be surprising — subversion is great software and the Art of Community lightening talks showed us that great communities create great software.

Last but not least, the term meritocracy was bantered about in a number of talks. Creating open source software isn’t commonly a democratic process where things are decided by voting (the subversion team suggests to leave voting as a last resort). Often times a handful of people make the most decisions in an open source project and these people have earned the right to make decisions because of their past contributions. That is to say that power is granted based on merit and thus term meritocracy fits much better than democracy. This term has been used a lot to describe the community that has formed around my own project MusicBrainz. Its quite pleasing to find validation of our terms in the greater community.

In a sense I’m realizing that past OSCONs didn’t cover enough meta open source topics like open data, community and power structures in communities. I welcome this expansion of coverage — it makes OSCON more balanced between presentations that cover the nitty gritty technical details and some of the more philosophical aspects of open source.

I have number of new thoughts to consider, new memes to explore and new friends to reconnect with after the conference. I also have a number of thoughts for presentations next year now that the focus of OSCON covers more meta topics in open source. I haven’t completely internalized this years conference yet I am already stoked about next years conference!

Thanks to the O’Reilly conferences team for another kick-ass conference!