I've been talking with Brian Cleland and Paul O'Malley about doing a Dublin-based follow up to last March's "FOSS Means Business" event.
October is the timeframe we're thinking about, so we have to start now or never.
This should be the (or a) main topic of January's meeting. (I missed the December meeting because my flight was cancelled due to fog - I'll be at January's and February's meetings)
So I've been thinking about what's the point? What are the goals? Who is the audience? What speakers are best?
Should we just get the usual speakers, and brief them that they should act business-like, and then tell the usual mailing lists, and attract the usual audience (but they will come with the unspoken knowledge that they should look and act a bit business-like)? Then we all have an interesting day, then go home?
Is that it? Is it really just for us? Or did we really think companies would come and would liberate their software the next day?
I don't think companies are going to liberate their software based on any inspirational event we can organise. So how does the free software community get businesses do liberate software?
1. It's by creating a market - by convincing software users not to buy non-free software. 2. It's by showing decision makers that free software is not risky, that support is available, that it's not going to disappear, and that they wouldn't be the first to move to free software. 3. It's by arming our embeds :) -all the free software supports working inside companies that use or distribute proprietary software -by arming them with the arguments and the examples and case studies necessary to make convincing arguments to the decision makers.
Item #1 is what the usual free software events do. So this kind of event should be aimed at items #2 and #3.
So, do people agree that both items #2 and #3 are worth aiming for and that an event can do both? What speakers have we seen that are good? What topics or types of talks are most useful? Are their goals, other than the three I've given, that we can aim for?