The conference went really well considering there was no electricity until 3pm. It wasn't their fault - the power was out in that whole part of the city apparently. Candace went ahead without the PowerPoint Slides she worked so hard to make and gave a great talk on Collaboration Nation. She gave an intro to a bunch of the different ways people collaborate and work together online. It can be a tough topic to approach when you're already using blogs, wikis and every Web 2.0 social site effortlessly. You have to go back to the spot you came in from and try to draw your audience in. I think Candace did a great job of it in the half hour she had. It sounds like U Windsor's got the Open Source bug. The new software they're deploying campus-wide is an open source Learning Management System called Sakai. The executive director of the Sakai foundation, Dr. Chuck, gave the keynote. It sounds like they follow a model a lot like Apache Foundation, in that there's a non-profit foundation which guides the project and a bunch of developers volunteering their time to get the actual work done. I'm glad they went with an open source provider from a philosophical view, but open source is not enough. It has to meet the needs of the users. I didn't hear much to convince me that it's there now but maybe they're moving in the right direction. I would just pull Sakai on to my own machine and try it out but it's Java based and I've only got a 50/50 success rate with Tomcat apps. Maybe I'll give it a whack later. The afternoon session - Cooking with Sakai - gave me a better feeling that there are some clever people working on integrating Sakai with the other systems at the U. Really all of this doesn't have any impact on me directly. I'm an alumni of University of Windsor so I care about the school and I might go back again one day but it doesn't impact me directly. Still, when people talk about Open Source and make decisions that reflect on communities I feel tied to then I have to have an opinion. Anyhow, the last session for me was The Inside-Out Library talk given by Mita Williams and Peter Zimmerman, both from Leddy Library. I didn't have high expectations on the way in but I found the topic to be surprisingly engaging. Mita explained by way of an informative story the problems that people run in to with getting access to articles published in research journals. They didn't start with the simple fact that people are charged large sums of money to get at articles published online but that even when the University has paid for students to have access there's no straightforward way for students to authenticate with the journal site. That is to say that the student gets a URL for a journal but is redirected to a page that asks for $25 or $30 to proceed to the article. Since there are many publishers and many journals from each publisher, it's not a simple problem to solve. On campus they use IP address-based solutions and off-campus they have strange proxy hacks that require special URLs. It doesn't sound nice from a network perspective but I understand why people use them - they need something that solves the problem of access immediately. Towards the end of the talk, Peter talked about efforts to get open access to journals. This is more of an analogue to what's happened in Open Source. I felt good hearing this since up to there I got the notion that it was okay that software should be free but not research. Specifically he talked about the efforts of the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) at Simon Frasier and the Open Journal Systems developed there. Since OJS is built using PHP and MySQL I was able to download it and get my own private demo up at home in a few minutes. It's a pretty wild world in research. I'm going to play with the application a little more but it looks like they've got something good started. Anyhow, it was a great day and I'm glad I went. Most of the time the fact there was no electricity wasn't even noticeable with the barbecue lunch & plenty of outdoor light. It turns out it's easy to talk technology and community when the speakers are engaging and people focus on what's being said without the distraction of overheads.