NERCOMP workshop of interest to the open source community

Upcoming NERCOMP workshop of interest to the open source community: Moving from Consumers to Prosumers: Maximizing Open Source Adoption Through Active Participation, April 28, UMass Lowell.

Open Source Software has passed--indeed, leaped over--the tipping point. Once questioned by senior IT leaders, unsure about how a community or peers could provide high-quality, reliable, secure, feature rich tools, Open Source Software is now prevalent (perhaps dominate) in several technology-driven sectors: education, government, healthcare, manufacturing, media. In 1998, the year the Open Source Initiative was founded, only 10% of organizations were using open source software; by 2011 more than 50% of organizations, surveyed by Gartner, reported using open source software. Gartner predicts that by 2015 at least 95% of mainstream IT organizations will leverage open source solutions within mission critical software deployments. And while adoption grows, so too do open source projects, Black Duck reports more than 2,000,000 projects are expected by the end of 2014 – twice as many as in 2012.

Today, it's not only IT working with technology, but the entire organization (procurement, IP, legal, HR, project management, senior leadership) must understand the Open Source ecosystem: the remote, distributed and decentralized communities of practice which enables collaboration, contribution and co-creation of mission-critical services and systems.

Several members of the Open Source Initiative's Board of Directors--experts in open source licensing, development and community--will provide insights and examples of how traditional organizations and IT shops can not only work with, but within, Open Source Software communities to enhance and extend operations and the organization as a whole. - See more at: http://nercomp.org/index.php?section=events&evtid=369#sthash.91uFSZt9.dpuf