B. Mann Consulting

This is the official first post announcing planning of the Open Source CMS and Blogging Tools Summit. I'm taking the opportunity of the Northern Voice conference (and especially the spirit of Moose Camp) to try and put together a mini-conference of a variety of open source communities.

The great thing about open source is that we can all share and learn from each other. Our only goal is to make our own "product" better and -- unlike proprietary systems -- there is a large incentive to work together on shared areas of interest. This is made even easier when there are other areas of overlap, like the standard "stack" of technologies that support these tools, from the Linux operating system, the Apache web server, MySQL and PostgreSQL databases, and Python/Perl/PHP coding languages.

I met with Zak Greant on Friday, who is an evangelist working with ez Systems, makers of the ezPublish CMS. Roland is going to be contacting local representatives of the Plone community, like Enfold Systems. Of course, the Drupal community will be here, with Dries Buytaert and other developers convening in Vancouver for our North American meetup (thanks Chad and Angie for kickstarting discussions about that).

I know that Matt Mullenweg is going to be coming up for Northern Voice, so perhaps he can extend his trip and talk a little WordPress.

In part, many of the ideas for this summit came about from a presentation by the Joomla guys to the DrupalCon Amsterdam 2005