OStatic

David Recordon, the open platforms tech lead for blogging company Six Apart, was on hand at OSCON this morning to deliver a keynote about ways to support the Open Web, a term that denotes a group of Web specifications developed within the open source community. Since many projects need help understanding the legalities behind adopting these specifications,ﾠ Recordon took the opportunity to announce the newly formed Open Web Foundation (OWF), an independent non-profit dedicated to the development and protection of open, non-proprietary specifications for web technologies.

The Ubuntu community hit the ground running at OSCON this week. Scarcely a couple of days into the event, there's already a new version of the distro to peruse and updates to the code hosting platform Launchpad to talk about. In the meantime, the project's founder, Mark Shuttleworth, still found time to deliver a presentation at the event and meet with a local tech group to talk about his vision for the future of Linux.

Successful open-source projects have strong communities. What can you do to ensure that the community around your project is as strong as possible? At least two talks at today's OSCon in Portland, Oregon, will address this issue. They will look at antipatterns, things that are known not to work when building a community. These talks come just a few months after the publication of Clay Shirky's new book, Here Comes Everybody, in which he describes how society is changing as a result of the fact that the Internet massively reduces the cost of communication, publication, and distribution.