Overview
Standards are of fundamental, critical importance to everyone who uses or develops information technology. However, when compared to the resources devoted to say, managing the software development lifecycle, there is surprisingly little attention paid to understanding and optimising standards or the standardisation process.
Now in its 6th year, Open Standards is an event that uniquely focuses on how to leverage IT standards with this year's theme being the valuable role played when open source software supports open standards. This value happens not because open source projects necessarily provide a perfect implementation, but because they can act as a transparent reference that benefits all stakeholders.
Greg Wilkins and Chris Messina to Keynote Open Standards 08
Greg Wilkins
Founder, Mortbay & CTO,
Webtide
Greg Wilkins is the lead developer of the highly regarded Jetty open source servlet server used by a multitude of both commercial (Cisco, Weblogic, IGN) and open source (Eclipse, Apache, Spring) products. Greg is a member of the experts group for the servlet specification from the Java Community Process and has contributed to Dojo, Cometd, Geronimo, JBoss, activemq, DWR and other open source projects.
Chris Messina
Open Source Advocate, Vidoop
Chris Messina, aka FactoryJoe, is an active proponent of Microformats and initiated the open protocol OAuth along with Blaine Cook. Currently residing in San Francisco, Chris is employed as an Open Source Advocate at identity company Vidoop. He was formerly co-founder of marketing agency Citizen Agency and is best known for his involvement in helping to create the BarCamp and Spread Firefox movement.