Bill Callahan and I are pleased to offer a last moment opportunity to join an important conversation just beginning on making NEO a global leader in the use of Free Open Source Software, with the man who wrote the Open Source Definition, Bruce Perens. Bruce is Vice President of Developer Relations and Policy for FOSS-related SourceLabs, of Seattle. NEO is fortunate to have a local connection with Bruce, as the Director of Marketing for SourceLabs, Athena Diamantis, lives in this region. Digital Vision Director Bill Callahan and East Cleveland CIO Abu Alli met with Bruce and Athena last week to discuss how to make NEO a world FOSS leader, and we decided that is a topic deserving much broader and more open attention. So tomorrow we continue growing the dialog.

Join us, if you may... 8 AM breakfast tomorrow at the Juniper Grill.

Some related topics include FOSS in education, government, industry, the non-profit sector and society in NEO. How do we create a FOSS savvy workforce? How do we empower citizens to leverage the power of FOSS? How do we educate government of the value of FOSS? How do we improve the value local businesses extract from FOSS? How do we build here a FOSS Center of Excellence? Help us decide. Please RSVP to norm [at] realneo [dot] us if you may join us. Cost: pay for your own breakfast.

From Wikipedia: "Bruce Perens was a former Debian GNU/Linux Project Leader, the primary author of the Open Source Definition, a founder of Software in the Public Interest, founder and first project leader of the Linux Standard Base project, the initial author of BusyBox, a founder of the UserLinux project, and co-founder of the Open Source Initiative (OSI). Perens also has a book series with Prentice Hall PTR called the Bruce Perens' Open Source Series."

From SourceLabs: "Bruce is widely recognized as one of the leaders of the open source development community. In addition to being the original author of the "Open Source Definition" and a founder of the Open Source Initiative, he is also a founder of the Linux Standard Base and Software in the Public Interest. Bruce served as project lead for the Debian GNU/Linux distribution and was the driving force behind putting the first Linux project onto a NASA Space Shuttle flight. Before becoming a pioneer in the open source community, Bruce was a software engineer in the computer graphics animation industry, and is credited in the films "A Bug's Life" and "Toy Story II." Bruce is also the series editor of Prentice Hall's "Bruce Perens Open Source Series." Each of the fifteen titles in the series is published under an open source license."

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