Joint Release from the City of Portland and GOSCON: Open Source in Government Week

Portland City Council Declares Open Source in Government Week, Conference Gathers National Technology and Policy Talent

PORTLAND, Ore. - U.S. Rep. David Wu will join a top-flight group of presenters and partners announced this week for the sixth-annual Government Open Source Conference (GOSCON), set for Oct. 27-28 at The Nines hotel in Portland.

This edition of GOSCON marks the conference’s return to Portland after being hosted in 2009 in Washington, D.C.

“Last fall, when the City of Portland adopted the nation's first open source software policy, one of our goals was to help attract premier open source conferences to Portland,” said Portland Mayor Adams. “Today I am pleased our efforts in working with [conference organizer] Deb Bryant and the Oregon State University Open Source Lab to bring GOSCON back to Portland have paid off.”

In recognition of the growing impact of the conference, the Portland City Council today proclaimed the week of Oct. 25 as “Open Source in Government Week.” That’s not the host city’s only contribution to the event: Mayor Sam Adams, Chief Technology Officer Mark Greinke and Senior Information Systems Manager Paul Rothi are among those from the Rose City scheduled to speak at GOSCON.

A host of information technology leaders from governments around the United States and abroad, open source not-for-profits and private industry who are scheduled to speak, from the Program Director for data.gov, Marion Royal, CIO of the New York State Senate (Andrew Hoppin) to the director of E-Services for the State of California (Carolyn Lawson) to the director of marketing and business development for IBM Linux open source platform (Jean Staten Healy). Congressman Wu, a Democrat representing Oregon’s 1st Congressional District, has just confirmed that he will provide comments at the Thursday luncheon just prior to the GOSCON Awards ceremony.

Speakers include:

• Bryan Sivak,chief technology officer for the District of Columbia;
• Dugan Petty, chief information officer for the State of Oregon;
• Andy Stein, director of IT for the City of Newport News, Virginia;
• David Riley, CONNECT initiative lead, Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology;
• Bibiana McHugh and Tim McHugh of the Tri-Met transportation department in Portland;
• Christopher Sean Morrison of the U.S. Army Research Laboratory;
• Gregory Miller of the Open Source Digital Voting Foundation;
• Gunnar Hellekson, chief technology strategist for Red Hat’s U.S. Public Sector group and co-chair, Open Source for America;
• J.J. Toothman of NASA’s Ames Research Center;
• Dan Melton, technical director of Code for America;
• Jonathan Russell of the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School;
• Michael Keating and Nick Grossman of OpenPlans;

The robust speakers lineup and growing government audience for open source software has also attracted impressive support for the educational non-profit event including Accenture, this year’s Diamond Sponsor, Gold Sponsor IBM, and Silver Sponsors DLT Solutions/Red Hat, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft and OpenPlans.

About the OSU Open Source Lab: The Oregon State University Open Source Lab is the home of growing, high-impact open source communities. Its world-class hosting services enable the Linux operating system, Apache web server, the Drupal content management system and more than 50 other leading open source software projects to collaborate with contributors and distribute software to millions of users globally. Through custom software development, vendor partnerships and industry events like the Government Open Source Conference (GOSCON), the Lab's staff and students encourage open source adoption in education, government, health care and other sectors. For more information, visit www.osuosl.org.

Media Contacts:

Todd Simmons, Oregon State University, +1.541.737.0790

Roy Kaufmann, Office of Mayor Sam Adams, +1.503.823.4700

Source:

Deborah Bryant, Oregon State University, +1.971.533.8050