Session SWIK: A Free Service for Open Source Developers Alex Bosworth, Program Manager, SourceLabs Track: Products & Services Date: Wednesday, August 3rd, 2005 Time: 11:35am - 12:20pm Location: D139-140 A raft of new collaboration technologies have either been invented in or adopted by the open source community: wikis, web services, blogs, rss/rdf, tagging, modular architecture. These technologies are found in many nooks and crannies of the open source world. The time has come to unify these technologies and the wealth of project data to take the effort out of finding open source projects and learning how to use them. SourceLabs's project Swik aims to do that by providing a free collaborative database of open source projects. Swik is a giant wiki, combined with tight RSS integration and intelligent heuristics to both bring in external project data and present it to users in a meaningful way. Tips, reference materials, howtos, configuration tutorials, project reviews, mailing list threads will all be combined and leveraged to make finding and using open source easy. Collective categorization and publishing represents a growing shift in the organization of data, led by examples such as del.icio.us, Flikr, and gmail. The idea that communities of users can cooperate to create great metadata about content and have the freedom to organize on a graph could be a powerful tool for organizing and delivering information about open source. This presentation will explore these concepts further and attendees will learn more about the needs and the benefits of an open source community using these various technologies. Attendees will also gain a better understanding which kinds of companies and ideas are making open source easier and bringing more useful documentation, services and support to the open source world. We look forward to feedback from the OSCON community on this approach and welcome your thoughts in a Q&A immediately following the talk.

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