OSS4B 2013, innovate through Open Source

The traditional Monash University Prato Centre, historical venue of the first European PGDay, will host the first edition of another conference: Open Source Software for Business, aka OSS4B.

OSS4B 2013 will take place in Prato, Tuscany, Italy on September 19 and 20. Through the experience gained with several organisations of PostgreSQL related events, we have tried to bring this kind of conference to a higher level, by embracing all open source technologies and services (not just Postgres) which are at the core of ICT enterprises.

Having said this, PostgreSQL will play a fundamental role in the event. Postgres major developer and contributor Simon Riggs will be presenting “Success is 99% Persistence”. I am looking forward to attending his overview of our fantastic open source project.

Another Postgres community member, Harald Armin Massa, will be the master of ceremony and, being our favourite Lightning Talk Man, he could not miss the lightning talk session!

Also, a booth is available for the Italian PostgreSQL Community, but members of PostgreSQL Europe as well are encouraged to join and help with the promotion.

Finally, I owe an overview of the conference. We chose for this year to focus on the synergy between agile methodologies (such as DevOps and Kanban) and Open Source Software. We believe indeed that the culture of continuous improvement (in Japanese, kaizen) reaches its maximum expression through open source technologies and community involvement.

Keynote speakers of this edition are Gene Kim (co-author of the best seller “The Phoenix Project”) and Dragos Dumitriu, the first IT manager to apply the Kanban methodology during his experience at Microsoft.

There will be a track dedicated to technologies, which will host talks about successful software such as Postgres (of course), Linux, MongoDB, Percona MySQL, Chef, Puppet, CFEngine, LibreOffice, OpenERP, etc.

For further information on the conference, its goals and registrations, please visit the OSS4B website. Early bird registrations end tomorrow.