[ILUG] Irish Open Source Technology Conference 2008

[Ciaran De Buitlear]

Hi,
  I heard about this from one of the organisers and am very interested in
attending. If you though there was any aspect of the following that people
would be interested in I would be interested to hear which aspects they
were.  I would be happy to give a brief talk or perhaps a questions and
answers session on this.

Just as background my experience with open source (I would describe myself
as a  business analyst and systems architect who no longer gets to write
code - others might use different terms :-)  …


We "discovered" the ACS in 1999
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArsDigita_Community_System which was an open
source toolkit created by Arsdigita run by Philip Greenspun. Myself and one
of the other guys here got interested and we figured the system out in our
spare time. Back at a point in '99 the .com bubble was growing and things
got a little bit quiet in here with relation to work coming in. We were
given some time to research the ACS in work here.
After about a week we landed a project for Oceanfree called
http://my.oceanfree.net "pick my interests" portal type system (funded by
ads etc).
We then did http://www.bestadvice.ie/ Insurance brokers information, product
comparison, comparative quotations (funded by ads and subscriptions).
And http://www.xtender.com search and browse EU tenders in 12 Eu languages,
push tenders to people based on preferences (funded by subscriptions).
We then did http://bookings.xscapeonline.co.uk (with Openacs) booking system
for indoor real snow ski slopes, capacity control, finance, web bookings,
online payments. There's 3 of these now.

We then started to work on AIMS http://www.totalaims.com based on the
Openacs and the rest is history…

Most of this stuff has been on Linux.