In July, I attended the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) in Portland, Oregon.

http://conferences.oreillynet.com/os2006/

The conference was great and I was lucky enough to attend with three other people that I know from the University of Florida. All of us had different interests, so we often attended different content tracks and were able to share the most interesting items that we learned about. Here is a picture of the Portland Convention Center:



I am particularly excited about one project named Cosmo, managed by the Open Source Applications Foundation (OSAF). Cosmo is a calendar and sharing server that is completely standards-compliant (for example, iCal, WebDAV, and CalDAV). Cosmo should be a boon for sites not wanting to run Microsoft Exchange but wanting to share calendar information between people. This project should be especially useful to sites with multiple desktop computing platforms. Be warned, the Cosmo project is still early in the development process. As stated on the Cosmo web site, "This software is still experimental. Do NOT trust your data to Cosmo 0.4."

http://cosmo.osafoundation.org/

I'll be watching this one closely.