Where the open source boys are

I attended the Central Pennsylvania Open Source Conference this weekend. It was a small conference. With the attendee count at 150, a better description might be "tiny". Yet even with a small number of people, it was a good conference.

There are few conferences for open source software. The big conference is O'Reilly's OSCON, which has been held for over ten years, at a variety of locations. Beyond OSCON, there are smaller conferences, but no large cluster of conferences. CPOSC is in Harrisburg, PA; Open Source Bridge is in Portland, OR; and there are conferences in Utah and Georgia.

I started thinking that there might be a clustering of conferences around open source communities, which led me to think about such communities. Is there a geographic concentration of open source projects? Something akin to a Silicon Valley for open source?

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that it did not exist, and probably would not exist. Open source projects are typically manned by volunteers, working at home or in employer-supplied facilities, but not in a central location. The open source model does not require a central office. Contributors do not commute to a common office every day, report to managers, sit at assigned desks, or attend mandatory status meetings.

Open source works in a distributed manner. The resources are people (and a few computers and network connections), not ores extracted from the ground or chemicals manufactured in a large plant. Open source projects don't need massive assembly plants, deep supply chains, volumous warehouses, starched uniforms, large cafeterias, or any of the industrial-age mechanisms that require incredible support mechanisms. The economic forces that pulled people together in the industrial age don't exist in open source. Daily physical presence is not needed.

Which is not to say that physical presence is completely useless. Physical presence is useful. E-mail, instant messaging, and web cameras provide a narrow channel of communication, much less than physical presence. Physical presence provides a "high bandwidth" channel, and it lets one get to know another person quickly. The communication through non-verbal language lets one person build trust in another. Physical presence is needed occasionally, not every day.

I expect to see more open source conferences. Small conferences, such as the Open Source Bridge conference in Portland and the CPOSC in Harrisburg. I expect that they will be in cities, in places with support for travel, lodging, and meetings. Convention centers, hotels, and colleges will be popular places.

I expect that they will occur across the country, and around the world. There will be no Silicon Valley of open source, no one location with a majority of the developers. Instead, it will be everywhere, with people meeting when and where they like.