20 Oct 2002 tgw   » (Journeyer)

I've been using the past year to get up-to-speed at devIS and have been on a sabbatical from working on open and free software during personal time. After working full-time without an income for over a year trying to get TDP off the ground (unsuccessfully, unfortunately), taking the past year off has been a welcomed break.

I've been thinking for awhile of getting back involved, and this past week began that transition. I spent Wednesday through Friday attending the eGovOS Conference held in Washington, DC at the facilities of George Washington University and the World Bank. It was a good conference, made up mostly of policy people. Tony Stanco and his team recruited an excellent collection of speakers. From the free/open software community I was able to meet Bruce Perens from OSI and Debian, Robin Miller from OSDN and Slastdot, Miguel de Icaza and Nat Friedman from Gnome and Ximian, Tim O'Reilly from O'Reilly & Associates, Frank Hecker from Mozilla, Marten Mickos and David Axmark from MySQL, Rob Page from Zope Corp, Edgar Villanueva Nunes, the Congressman from Peru who stood up to Microsoft, and Vinay Deshpande of the Simputer Trust and Encore Software. Other interesting people I had the chance to meet were Doug Maughan from DARPA and Terry Bollinger from MITRE.

In re-looking at my Advogato page, I'm realizing that a number of the links I had posted earlier are broken. Since technodemocracy.org is no longer online, that accounts for several of the broken links. Here is a listing of archived versions of TDP links I reference below:

Also of interest (to me, at least), the US Congress *finally* passed Election Reform Legislation this past week (16 Oct 2002). The Election Center website has explanatory material on the legislation (HR3295).

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