Open Innovation at the Open Source Junction

This guest post has been contributed by Ross Gardler of OpenDirective. Ross is Vice President of Community Development at The Apache Software Foundation and a mentor at the Outercurve Foundation. Ross has been active in open development of open source software for over ten years.

Over the last couple of years OSS Watch has run a series of three events called the Open Source Junction (OSJ). These events aimed to bring together academia and the commercial sector to foster communication, collaboration and open innovation and were kicked off by Gabriel Hanganu when I was a member of the OSS Watch team. The second two editions were held after I had left to start OpenDirective. Having understood OSS Watch’s vision for these I continued to participate.

With an explicit goal of building a network to surface new opportunities for collaboration between academic and commercial participants OSS Watch had decided to tackle some significant challenges. Consequently, the OSS Watch team planned to work between events to help build on these opportunities. Each subsequent event sought to broaden these participation networks even further...