Sebastopol, CA, January 12, 2007—The Call for Participation is now open for OSCON, the O'Reilly Open Source Convention. This year, the program will focus on the progress and innovation that open source movers and shakers are contributing to the computing industry.

Program chairs will be looking for proposals that convey real-world scenarios using open source, and the new tools and ideas that will help participants be more productive or write better code. OSCON will return to the Oregon Convention Center in Portland from July 23-27, 2007. The Call for Participation deadline is February 5, 2007.

"We want to hear about your winning techniques, favorite life-savers, and the system you've made that everyone will be using next year," notes program co-chair Nathan Torkington.

The program committee is planning to offer hundreds of sessions and tutorials on Linux, PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby, Java, databases, desktop applications, web applications (client-side and server-side), Windows, administration, security, and emerging topics. Session and tutorial proposals should contain actionable information and advice, above and beyond what is currently available online or in books.

This year's hot topics include:

-Tools for the administration and deployment of large server farms -Parallelization, grid, and multicore technologies -Virtualization -Ajax, Javascript, standards-based design, and other client-side web  issues -Seaside, Rails, Django, and other interesting server-side web technology -Ubuntu as an emergent usable Linux distro and contender for Red Hat and  Sun's client and server markets -Java as open source -AI, machine learning, and other ways of making software smarter than the  people using it -User experience and usability engineering lessons for web and desktop  software -The spread of open source into law, culture, data, and services, and the  accompanying issues and lessons

More information on speakers, sessions, tutorials, and events will be available when general registration opens in April 2007.

OSCON is one of the most popular places for the open source community to meet up, debate, make deals, and connect face to face. Over 2,500 programmers, hackers, IT managers, designers, academics, and alpha geeks are expected to attend this year. OSCON 2006 was the biggest event yet, drawing more than 2,700 participants from every free and open source denomination along with 65 sponsors, exhibitors, and community projects on the show floor. Now in its ninth year, OSCON is the bazaar of open source technologies, welcoming new voices and projects alongside the platforms, languages, and apps that started the open source movement.

Additional Resources:

For convention details and to submit a proposal, visit: http://conferences.oreilly.com/oscon

For news articles, blogs, announcements, and photos (available for use with attribution) from OSCON 2006, see: http://www.oreillynet.com/conferences/blog/oscon

For OSCON 2006 plenary presentations, visit: http://osc.gigavox.com/series/oscon.html

For information on exhibition and sponsorship opportunities at O'Reilly conferences, contact

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-O'Reilly Emerging Telephony Conference, February 27-March 1, 2007 in
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-O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, March 25-29, 2007 in San Diego -Web 2.0 Expo, co-produced by O'Reilly Media and CMP Technology,
 April 15-18, 2007 in San Francisco, CA
-MySQL Conference & Expo, April 23-26, 2007 in Santa Clara, CA -RailsConf, May 17-20, 2007 in Portland, OR -O’Reilly Where 2.0 Conference, May 29-30, 2007 in San Jose, CA -O’Reilly TOC Conference, June 18-20, 2007 in San Jose, CA -RailsConf Europe, co-presented by O'Reilly Media and Ruby Central,
 September 17-19, 2007 in Berlin, Germany

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