Open World Forum 2011

Saturday 24 September I joined two of my colleagues at the Experiment Day of the Open World Forum in Paris. Since it took place not far from the Crazy Horse I had no difficulties in finding the venue. My colleagues had come the day before by car because they had to bring books and magazines and especially the OSPV1, our open-source auto-balancing two-wheeled vehicle that we were to present.

The OSPV1 self balancing vehicle

The Forum was held in a rather high-class venue that had been paid for by a very impressive collection of sponsors in one of those rich “quartiers” of Paris where you get more easily run over by a Ferrari then by a Peugeot. The Open World Forum is all about Open Source; here the first question people ask you about a product is what license it is released under. I tend to associate Open Source with financially impaired people (i.e. students) with beards and spectacles hacking away in poorly furnished rooms and so it seems strange to actually meet these people (who came indeed pretty close to how I always had imagined them) in such a high-end place. Free lunch & drinks for everybody, all you can eat sushi in the pressroom, a real “we don’t care about money we only care about Open Source” attitude.

The ambiance was quite arty and inspiring with many great projects being showed off. It was interesting to meet so many people working with electronics without having a formal electronics education. They simply define an objective and then see what they can do with plug ‘n’ play electronics like Arduino to achieve it. These are electronics users (or should I say consumers) that embed ready-made building blocks in their projects.

I was a bit disappointed by the number of visitors. For some reason too few interested people made it on this sunny day to avenue George V. Maybe they didn’t have the money for a metro ticket? Make sure you visit next time, it is definitely worth skipping a lunch to save some money to pay for the trip.