Before this site was a publication, its address belonged to a conference. Open Web Vancouver was a volunteer-run, non-profit conference on open source technology, held at the Vancouver Convention & Exhibition Centre in 2008 and 2009. The conference is long over and its original site is gone, but many pages around the web still point here, so this page records what happened, written from the archived copies of the original site.
What the conference was
Open Web Vancouver was presented by the Vancouver PHP Users Association, a registered non-profit for the advancement of PHP and the open web. It grew out of the association’s earlier PHP conferences, which had sold out and drawn audiences from well beyond the city. Rasmus Lerdorf, the creator of PHP, gave the keynote at the 2007 event.
The stated goal, in the organizers’ own words, was “to showcase open web technologies, communities and culture, and to evangelize the Open Web to developers, designers, organizers and the community at large.” Talks were invited on PHP, Python, Ruby on Rails, Perl, Linux, Django, Drupal, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Apache, MySQL and the rest of the open stack. The format was deliberately affordable, priced far below the commercial conferences of the day, and it was run entirely by volunteers.
Open Web Vancouver 2008
The 2008 conference ran Monday, April 14 to Tuesday, April 15 at the Vancouver Convention & Exhibition Centre, 999 Canada Place. Two keynotes anchored it:
- Tim Bray, co-editor of the XML specification, on “The Future Face of the Web”: where web standards and the technologies around them were heading.
- Zak Greant on “The Age of Literate Machines: A Visionary Look at Open Source”: an argument that free and open source software matters to free societies, told through the history of our freedoms “from ancient god-kings to hacker heretics”.
Sessions covered everything from CakePHP rapid development and Google Gears to mesh networking, open content in music, and open source as a method for progressive social change. Attendees shared photographs under the tag openweb2008, and after the closing day the organizers put out a call for volunteers to run the next one.
Open Web Vancouver 2009
The second and final conference ran Thursday, June 11 to Friday, June 12, 2009, again at the VCEC. Early-bird tickets were $150, with 150 available, and regular tickets $180. The 2009 keynote speakers:
- Angela Byron, a lead of the Drupal project, on “Women in Open Source”.
- Rickard Falkvinge, founder of Sweden’s Pirate Party, on the politics of copyright and digital rights.
Women in Open Source
Angela Byron’s 2009 keynote is the page on the old site that the rest of the web referenced most, so it deserves its own record. Her abstract described the open source world as “rich with opportunities”: working with people of all cultures, collaborating with some of the biggest and brightest minds, changing the world by providing free tools to non-profits, schools and governments, and building marketable skills. And then the question the talk hung on: “But yet, so many women are missing out. Why is that? And what can we do to change it?”
The talk set out to answer both questions and to offer practical strategies for women who wanted to get involved. Byron, known across the Drupal community as webchick, described herself at the time as “obsessed with Drupal, working with open source and getting new people (especially women) involved”. The questions she raised in 2009 stayed at the centre of the open source community’s conversation about itself for the decade that followed.
Where the record lives
The original conference site was built on Drupal and went offline years ago. The Internet Archive holds copies of many of its pages, and this page was written from them:
- The 2009 conference homepage, with the registration news and keynote announcements.
- The “Women in Open Source” keynote page, with Angela Byron’s full abstract.
- The 2008 conference details, with the venue, dates and call for speakers.
Old conference URLs on this domain, including the schedule, the speaker pages and the keynote pages, now redirect here rather than to a dead end. If you arrived from a link on another site, this is what that link was about.
Frequently asked questions
What was the Open Web Vancouver conference?
It was a volunteer-run, non-profit conference on open source technology, communities and culture, presented by the Vancouver PHP Users Association. It ran twice, in 2008 and 2009, at the Vancouver Convention & Exhibition Centre, and grew out of the association's earlier PHP conferences, which had sold out and drawn international audiences.
When and where was it held?
The 2008 conference ran April 14 to 15, and the 2009 conference June 11 to 12. Both were held at the Vancouver Convention & Exhibition Centre at 999 Canada Place in downtown Vancouver, the largest conference facility in the city's inner harbour.
Who gave the keynotes?
In 2008, Tim Bray, co-editor of the XML specification, spoke on the future of the web, and Zak Greant on open source and free societies. In 2009, Angela Byron of the Drupal project gave the talk called Women in Open Source, and Rickard Falkvinge, founder of Sweden's Pirate Party, spoke on copyright and digital rights.
What was the Women in Open Source talk about?
Angela Byron's 2009 keynote asked why so many women were missing out on the opportunities of open source, from worldwide collaboration to marketable skills, and what the community could do to change that. It also offered practical strategies for women who wanted to get involved.
Why do old conference links redirect to this page?
The original conference site was built on Drupal and went offline years ago, so its URLs, including the schedule and the keynote pages, would otherwise reach a dead end. They now redirect here, where the conference is recorded from the Internet Archive's copies of the original pages.
