Connecting with the Open Source Community at OSCON

OSCON LogoThis past week marked the first time AEGIS participated in the Open Source Convention (OSCON) at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, Oregon. OSCON is where all of the pieces come together: developers, innovators, businesspeople, and investors. Mario Hyland and I participated and spoke on behalf of Open Health Tools (OHT) CONNECT Program, Open Source Electronic Health Record Alliance (OSEHRA) and the AEGIS Developers Integration Lab (DIL) open source program – along with HL7, and Healtheway – on the critical need for an Integrated Ecosystem based on Interoperability Testing. I thought our presence was a great success. We had the chance to hear from a lot of developers who have been using our testing tools and very pleased with them. We also heard from a lot of developers who had not been working with the DIL and we were able to educate them about its features and benefits to their work. It was a chance for us to learn as well – in addition to browsing the many vendor booths, we also had an opportunity to tinker with some of the latest Open Web technologies.

One thing we noticed during our participation at OSCON is that Open Source is no longer on the fringe. Hundreds of organizations such as PayPal, Twitter, HP and Google are investing millions into the creation and maintenance of Open Source software both for internal and external use. These tech behemoths have discovered that Open Source promotes better quality development through transparency, encourages employee retention and builds brand awareness in the tech community.

Today OSCON is about real-world practices and how to successfully implement open source in your workflow or projects. OSCON covers the open source stack in its entirety: not just one language, tool or philosophy, but all of the moving parts integrated and working together. Collaborative and transparent, open source has become the modus operandi for many IT shops, powering the next wave of innovation in cloud, data, and mobile technologies. Once considered a radical upstart, open source has moved from disruption to default. Its methods and culture commoditized the technologies that drove the Internet revolution and transformed the practice of software development. OSCON allows you to learn about and practice the entire range of open source technologies.

AEGIS has contributed a version of our Developers Integration Lab (DIL) software code to the Open Source community through OSEHRA under the Apache 2.0 license. AEGIS continues to play an active role in encouraging hands-on community participation in the development of the tool. We want to encourage the adoption of Open Source technologies to make development simple and useful.

Want to find out more about OSCON? Check out their daily keynote overviews:
Day 1 keynote coverage
Day 2 keynote coverage
Day 3 keynote coverage

The entire list of speaker notes and some video recordings are available on the official OSCON website.

Make sure to follow AEGIS and OSCON on Twitter: @AEGIS.net and@oscon

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