Last week I got to be part of OpenEd09 - a conference hosted (for the first time) here in Vancouver all about openness in information technology and the education system. I had been invited to be on an parallel panel about copyright and creative commons but when I checked out the schedule I wanted in!

Fortunately the organizers were pretty cool and let me sneak in for free so I ended catching some amazing presentations and discussions, all now available on UStream. In particular I recommend Gardner Campbell on "No Digital Facelifts: Thinking the Unthinkable About Open Educational Experiences", Jim Groom on "The Design of Openness", and John Maxwell on "Wiki as CMS/LMS".

On Friday I presented a talk at the 2009 OpenWeb Vancouver conference entitled Collapsenomics 101: Finding (Open) Opportunities Amidst the Chaos. You can view the slides from my OpenOffice presentation as a Shockwave animation by clicking here (click to advance to the next slide).

I began by talking about the economic downturn and the first slides show what's been happening with various economic indicators over the past year as compared to the Great Depression of 1929. As you can see most indicators show steeper decline. I emphasized that Europe and Asia have been affected more strongly than the US which has resulted in a flood of investment into the US dollar and has really helped prop up the US stock market especially since January. This will not last.

I finally watched the Google Wave presentation (below) the other day. I've been doing a lot a fair bit of reading about it and have decided to develop expertise in it with the goal of adding it to my consulting practice. Developers have already started working with the open standards of its XMPP-based protocol and the speculation is that there will be Wave plugins for OpenFire (which is what I currently run) before very long.

I think that pretty much only Google could have developed this - Andy Ihnakto summed it up nicely when he noted:

Yesterday's trip to Banyen books helped cement this summer's course of study. I'm in the habit of focussing in the summer on a couple of areas that have been percolating throughout the winter and now I've narrowed it down to the following three.

The first is a sustained study of Integral Ecology. After reading some great reviews I've finally picked up a copy of "Integral Ecology: Uniting Multiple Perspectives in the Natural World" (link is yet another site running Drupal, BTW).

I caught the closing session of Vidfest on Friday - a call to arms to defend net neutrality, entitled "Can I Have Your Attention Please? An Internet SOS", featuring Matt Thompson and Jason Roks.

Today's announcment that Verizon and Mozilla are joining the Linux Mobile Foundation (LiMo) is great news for the advancement of mobile Linux.

Having a major carrier like Verizon announce that they "will encourage its handset partners to use the OS even if it is not a part of LiMo" and that they will "make a big financial commitment by hiring people" signals great confidence in open platforms as the way forward.