The O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) has issued a call for proposals for its next annual show. Scheduled for July 19-23, at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, OSCON 2010 is looking for sessions and tutorials covering everything from open source developments in smartphones, to virtualization, to open source in education and government.

Now in its 12th year, OSCON continues to be an important Linux gathering, combining desktop, enterprise, and embedded topics. Not surprisingly, considering the conference is hosted by technology book publisher O'Reilly, OSCON also offers a healthy dose of programming and scripting tutorials.

In 2008 in Portland, Intel and Moblin.org used the meeting to reveal major changes for Moblin, and this year in San Jose, where the conference featured over 200 sessions, Microsoft used the occasion to announce its "say what?" bombshell about releasing 20,000 lines of code under GPLv2 for three Linux device drivers.

Next year the conference returns to Portland, and program chairs Edd Dumbill and Allison Randal have opened the call for participation, requesting proposals for sessions and tutorials. Proposals are said to be especially welcome on the following topics:

• Doing more with less
• Design and usability
• Open source in smart phones and mobile networked devices
• Cloud computing, openness in distributed services
• Parallelization, grid, and multi-core technologies
• Open web, open standards, open data
• AI, machine learning, and other ways to make software smarter
• Open source in democracy, politics, government, and education
• Best practices for building a business model around open source
• Virtualization, appliances, and how to create and deploy them

Tracks planned for the show are said to include:

• Administration — open source innovations in system and network administration
• Business — open source best practices applied within the enterprise, legal issues and marketing strategies
• Cloud Computing — how open source is pushing distributed services forward
• Databases — Essential techniques and advanced tips in MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, etc.
• Design & Usability — Users and their experiences, user-centered design, techniques and metrics for usability.
• Emerging Topics — promising projects, proposals, and people (everything that doesn't fit in another track)
• Fundamentals — the basics that all open source enthusiasts need to thrive
• Government — open tools that promote transparency, accountability, and engagement
• Java — new tools, building on OpenJDK, Harmony, etc.
• Linux — creation, use, and future direction of Linux and its killer apps, from kernel and distros to office suites and multimedia
• Mobile — ahead-of-the-curve open telephony and mobile technologies, people, projects, and activities pushing the boundaries of what's possible
• Perl — (Perl Conference 12) Perl 5 and Perl 6, trends from databases to mod_perl to Perl hacks for productivity
• PHP — (PHP Conference 8) migration, deployment, security, and preparing for the future
• Programming — hard-core open source tools, technologies, and techniques for elegant, quality coding
• Python — (Python 16 Conference) latest developments, Python 2.x and 3.0
• Ruby — Rails, Ruby 2.0, test, deploy, extend, and integrate

Proposals are being accepted for 40-minute panels, group discussions, or presentations, or three-hour tutorials, says O'Reilly. Proposals should include a title, overview, main idea, sub-topics, conclusion, suggested track, speaker(s), expertise, and biography. The proposals should also include audience expertise level (novice, intermediate, or expert).

Availability

Proposals for OSCON 2010, which will be held July 19-23, at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, will be accepted through Feb. 1, 2010, here. Early registration will open in April.

Articles, blogs, photos, videos, and speaker presentation files from OSCON 2009 may be found here.

This article was originally published on LinuxDevices.com and has been donated to the open source community by QuinStreet Inc. Please visit LinuxToday.com for up-to-date news and articles about Linux and open source.