Put open source to work
July 16–17, 2018: Training & Tutorials
July 18–19, 2018: Conference
Portland, OR

The future is still open: Building on over 20 years of collaboration (sponsored by Red Hat)

Deborah Bryant (Red Hat)
2:35pm–3:15pm Thursday, July 19, 2018
Sponsored
 Location: E143/144
Average rating: *****
(5.00, 1 rating)

What you'll learn

  • Reflect on the location and nexus of open source's roots in the Portland area (since OSCON has come back again to PDX
  • Celebrate collaboration and see how that value will extend into the future view for open source software

Description

2018 is a banner celebration year for open source. Both the Open Source Initiative (OSI) and OSCON are celebrating their 20th birthdays (as is the term “open source”), and Red Hat is celebrating its 25th. And it should come as no surprise to many at OSCON that the same people contributing to open source in the communities of Portland (and the entire state of Oregon) are among the many individuals shaping the past, present, and future of the open source movement.

Through the lens of her experience as the former Oregon deputy state CIO and public sector communities manager at Oregon State University’s Open Source Lab (OSUOSL), as well as her current role as senior director in Red Hat’s Office of the CTO, Deborah Bryant offers a brief history of open source’s major milestones, treating you to a view of the ways that OSCON’s “home” has influenced the movement. Along the way, Deb details the history of the Linux ecosystem and its influence on the global adoption of open source software in the enterprise and Oregon’s seminal role in promoting the adoption of open source by government agencies and creating a home for high-impact community projects. The story of open source is really the story of this interconnected evolution and how it has taken us from a world where we bought software in boxes to today’s world of hybrid cloud, containerized everything, and a future that is ever more automated.

Uniting all of these elements, though, is the strongest and most resilient of all technologies: the building and maintenance of human systems via collaboration, mutual trust, and community. The steward of more than 450 open source projects, Red Hat has been successful only by creating, maintaining, and cultivating these resilient human systems through an open source-always, upstream-first, constant-collaboration philosophy. It’s this same approach that allows enterprises to survive and thrive through this era of digital transformation, and it’s this same approach that is already dictating the rules of engagement as computing evolves.

Deb concludes with some thoughts on the next 20 years of computing, from the role of security in the daily lives of technologists to the implications of AI and ML for the enterprise and the continued importance of traditional data center in a cloud-centric world to how understanding how to work the open source way will be the key to success in this new world where open source has thrived.

This session is sponsored by Red Hat.

Photo of Deborah Bryant

Deborah Bryant

Red Hat

Deborah Bryant is senior director for open source and standards in the office of the CTO at Red Hat. An acknowledged international expert in the adoption and use of open source software and open development models as well as open source community health, Deborah is interested in the ethical use of artificial intelligence and machine learning, as well as industry accountability for use of personal information. Prior to her deep involvement in open source, Deborah helped build Oregon-based emerging technology startups, parallel and high-speed computing and commercialized internet and web applications in the ‘80s, and commercial wide-area networks, advanced telecommunications, and data/voice convergence in the ’90s. Her public sector background includes 10 years in state government, as deputy state CIO, an elected official in coastal Oregon, and public sector communities manager at Oregon State University, where she built the school’s Open Source Lab. Deborah serves on numerous boards with public trust agendas and an emphasis on open source software as enabling technology; her current roles include board adviser for the Open Source Elections Technology (OSET) Foundation and board director emeritus for the Open Source Initiative (OSI), the international standards organization for open source software. She also recently joined the freshly launched Mission AI project as an adviser to promote public education and discourse on the use of artificial intelligence. Deborah has authored or contributed to numerous published studies related to open source in the public sector, adaptation of new collaborative models for economic development, and the use of open source software in the US energy sector for cybersecurity. She received the prestigious industry Open Source Award in 2010 in recognition of her contribution to open source communities and for her pioneering advocacy of the use of open source software in the public sector.