Sessions at Open Source Bridge 2009 about business entrepreneur opensource consult on Thursday 18th June

Idealist.org was started in 1995 by Ami Dar as a simple one-page website that cataloged links to other non-profits. In the last 14 years, the site has gone from that simple list of links to a highly scalable dynamic website with over a million users, providing them and their communities with a forum to connect and communicate. Many thousands of people over the years have gotten their jobs or volunteer opportunities through Idealist, and soon we will be rolling out the third generation of our site to provide even more power to people interested in changing the world into a better place. Our talk will present a short history of the open source technology that drives our site, what our future plans are, and how we are releasing several of our Python web technologies as open source products for other members of our community to use and share.

There are Open Source projects to develop software for all sorts of specialized uses. Indeed, there are complete Linux distributions for K-12 schools, for libraries, for geographers, for musicians, and so on. But, there is very little available specifically for small farmers in the Open Source world.

In this talk, we will discuss the reasons for this and ways of changing the situation.

In particular, we will discuss:
* The differing needs of different types of farms
* Similarities between farm culture and Open Source culture
* Software requirements: What applications do farmers need?
* What applications already exist?
* What applications need to be created?
* How should software by packaged for farmers?

The author will discuss these and other issues from the point of view of someone who grew up on a small traditional farm, and spent his career in Open Source Software, and is now farming again.