BANGALORE, INDIA: My starting point for this blog was going to be about the large Open Source annual event of the year called OSCON 2011  and sure enough it was interesting in terms of the spread of topics and speakers advocating how and where Open Source is growing.

True to the spirit of Open Source, the event has made it very easy to 'participate' by making most, if not all, of the material available from its website which includes an indexed list of speakers and their slides. What struck me most was that Open Source is now a fact of life, and most IT shops have become users in some way or other over the last few years, so this is a pretty good overview on the topic, but it seems lacking any big news!

What has caught my eye is all the recent material about the way we build and deliver software in terms of methods and an escalating debate as to whether traditional project management is helping or hindering in these changes.

This also includes one area that I think may be big news, and makes logical sense as a build on how things are progressing, and that's 'social coding'. If you are not up to speed on this topic then Rick Freedman wrote a good piece entitled 'Social coding – the next wave in development'  on the TechRepublic website in July. By the way, the last line in this piece is critical and I will be coming back to this point.

There are several start-ups in this space, but GitHub  is the one I am most aware of and is linked to Tim O'Reilly and the Open Source movement, so it's a good example. The idea is to make it 'easier to collaborate with others and share your projects with the universe.' A claimed one million people are using GitHub and have stored two million code repositories for reuse through a set of powerful tools that GitHub was created around.

Why it interests me is that it corresponds to the way business itself is changing, i.e. a focus towards an ever-increasing amount of online interactions and collaborations in the front office around events and markets that are for ever changing, rather than the back office and its large stable of carefully crafted and compliant, maintained, transactional processes.

In short, it mirrors the fluid interactions and collaborations to deliver short-term optimizations and success. To me, it's the shift in organizing how we respond to and deliver to a new generation of requirements that's the issue, much, much more than the discussions on Agile, Scrum, etc.

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