Business

Does your organization suck at bringing awesome products to market? Are you wishing that you weren't lagging behind your competitors or struggling to create a culture and environment that would enable building the next killer application? If so, come to this business track focused workshop to learn from an experienced entrepreneur how to enable your teams to innovate more effectively. Read more.

Getting everyone in your company or development team on the same page can be a challenge. This on-your-feet workshop will teach fast, fun improv techniques for helping your group to bond and work better together. Learn the secrets of improv-based team building from two professionals who have decades of experience working in open source, Internet start-ups and corporate training. Read more.

This talk is for technical leaders and managers who want their companies to do more in open source. I will give you a CC-licensed presentation template and techniques for explaining open source business models, communities, licensing, and contribution processes to executives and lawyers in your company. You can then customize this for your own company and make the pitch for more OSS involvement. Read more.

Most companies large and small have shared internal libraries and systems. But ownership of that code often falls onto people with different priorities than the users of the code. We will discuss how you can use open source practices to run internal code bases effectively, provide learning opportunities for employees, and improve your final products. Read more.

Many tech companies and hiring managers would like to hire from a more diverse pool of qualified applicants, but they keep getting the same kinds of candidates. This talk provides specific tips for tweaking recruiting practices to attract a diverse pool of candidates, and offers tips for creating a culture that helps retain a diverse team of tech talent. Read more.

One of the most challenging aspects of growing community is managing conflict and burnout. In this new presentation from Jono Bacon, the Ubuntu Community Manager, he presents a comprehensive guide to the different components of conflict and burnout, signs of problems, conflict resolution, and preventative measures, all wrapped up in his amusing anecdote-laden style. Read more.

Time has changed since the start of Open Source. Companies has now started to understand that they can use open source without having to pay for it. How can one today create a viable business around open source software? Read more.

This talk will explore some of the legal and policy implications of "post-open source software" or "POSS", a purported phenomenon characterized by development on github, no explicit indication of open source licensing, and no concern for project governance. Is any of this real, and if so, is it actually a problem? Read more.

The Defensive Patent License (DPL) is a new legal mechanism to protect innovators by creating a patent network that is committed to defense and "de-weaponizing" patents. It draws from the theories and values of F/OSS licensing to create obligations that "travel with the patent"--preventing troll from taking over open technologies and pulling them out of the public domain. Read more.

The JOBS act will change the rules for public offerings of stock, making the crowdfunding of stock sales legal. This will allow Open Source developers and makers to create new technology companies by leveraging their existing communities for initial funding. Join us to discuss what we know, and what we don't about this new funding option. Read more.

At O'Reilly, we've always tried to live by the slogan "Create more value than you capture." It's a great way to build a sustainable business and a sustainable economy. Read more.

The governments of the US and India have released the Open Government Platform, an open source capability for any government to use to create an open data portal. Such projects encourage transparency, innovation, and economic growth in nations. The OGPL community encompasses hundreds of individuals from across the world to help further these shared goals. Read more.

Hear first-hand how automakers are re-thinking their structure and business models to move in-sync with the broader connected ecosystem and consumer trends. Explore how the GM SDK will expand access to the infotainment environment and engage the developer community through enabling multiple opportunities for app monetization. Read more.

Can a corporate predator become a community herbivore? Perhaps - corporations take a journey from control freak to community contributor. Hear about the journey and the key changes that can make it succeed. Read more.

In this 40-minute session, I’d like to discuss the basic business needs in several use-case scenarios that would demonstrate the flexibility of an open-source platform called Drupal, which has made a breakthrough in the CMS community for its extreme flexibility and scalability in rapid development. Read more.

Imagine an organization designed to create happiness among its workers. I’ll talk about my research for the past several years, companies I’ve visited, struggles against my own preconceptions, the surprising number of others who are pushing on the same ideas and writing books on the subject, things I’ve found that seem like answers, and questions that continue to accumulate. Read more.

You've come up with the next gadget, Kickstarter has found you customers and proven the demand. Now, you're a victim of your own success & you have to get 10,000 made. In this session, Brady Forrest will explain how companies tackle the challenges of actually making something—and the hard realities of scaling your initial prototype to thousands of finished products. Read more.

You're a fantastic developer/coder of all trades/project manager/designer/sysadmin - but you want to be able to do a little more. What's your strategy for being able to choose your next level up? We’ll review: strategic and tactical steps, choosing your adventure and acting on it from both a business perspective of a 'career track' as well as ways to be able to participate through open source. Read more.

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Many projects would like to have more people doing more stuff, but delegating seems time-consuming. Meanwhile, new contributor enthusiasm is one of the most valuable commodities in the free software world. Great delegators know how to attract enthusiastic new people and maintain their momentum once they've arrived. Read more.

This talk progresses through a succession of counterexamples (and a few examples) in combining business and open source. We will cover ways to divide your community, withhold value from your customers (paying and not), squander good will, and inhibit adoption. Read more.

How should an upstream project react when it discovers a security problem? Projects used by many distributions have lots of exposure when security bugs are identified. Since we can’t keep security events from happening, we need to be good at fixing them in a timely, responsible manner. This talk covers how to handle security events from disclosure to resolution as modeled by the Puppet project. Read more.