Open it! Yes, everything!

I’m a bit late on my post about the Open Everything speed-geeking gig and just general geek-out at Cape Town’s Birds Boutique Cafe. I can be forgiven however: I’ve had a birthday, I’m moving house, moving city, dealing with a new born baby, buying a new car, starting a new job, and palming off my Weimaraner on someone else (sucker! :-))… it’s all happening.

Even though I was a bit of a Zombie, I thoroughly enjoyed Open Everything (Pics here). I did my second ever speed-geek — this one was a 5-minute chat, nine times over, on Thought Leader. Thought Leader is built on an open source platform in WordPress, and has a semi-open publishing model in that it is not exclusively restricted to journalists. Didn’t know what I was saying any more after speed geek number 8.

I then, together with Steve Song, interviewed Aslam Raffee — who is a major open source advocate in government. From what Raffee says, it looks like there an ongoing, intensifying Open Source push at all levels of government… I mentioned it would be great if government here could emulate and get to the level of their counterparts in Brazil. Open source is more than just code, but an ethos and culture — and Aslam explained his efforts to inculcate this throughout government. He also spoke about some of the criticisms of open source technology — and how he countered them.

(Pic: Tino Kreutzer and Mark Surman)

Mark Surman, Helen King, & Philipp Schmidt of the Shuttleworth Foundation put together a great event, and I hope we’ll be seeing more of them here at the tip of Africa. The whole place erupted in a Happy Birthday to little old moi — which was a great surprise! I also finally got me hard/real-world copy of the now-legendary Quirk e-Marketing book as a birthday present.

Kif event. Kif venue. Kif people.

Open Everything Cape Town

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