I’ve just spent the last couple of days in Oxford, at the OSS Watch event focused on context-aware mobile technologies…and most interesting it was too!

And packed with talks. Too many to properly go into here as I’m one of those people that believes blog posts shouldn’t really end up the size of a report…or books ;)

Naturally, there was a lot of focus on geolocation implementations – the use of Open Street Map data, mashed with twitter streams, media, social networking & tagging, crowdsourcing and even a spot of augmented reality. Some cool stuff. In fact, quite a lot of cool stuff.

Two pieces of work in the Edu Institutional space, both benefitting from JISC funding, which are big favourites of mine, were presented – MyMobileBristol and MOLLY – both open source solutions for institutions to deliver key services to students through their mobile devices. Access to local travel information such as bus times, library services, PC availability, news, events, contacts…you know…all the kind of stuff you would expect when it comes to service delivery. Over the coming months I’m going to be looking at ways in which CETIS can help to raise awareness and advertise these tools to institutions and – hopefully – help uptake and roll-out across institutions and engagement with the open source community that can then assist sustainability of these frameworks. I would strongly advise institutions that are considering and developing their mobile strategy (for I sincerely hope most, if not all, are doing!) to check these out. Stay tuned for an upcoming event organised by yours truly over the next few months.

There was also a load of great advice on building open source communities, processes and tools for open development collaboration, open source business models and open development & IPR. All while – across both days – allowing plenty of slots and time for folks to do the self-pitch, speed date and general interactive sessions where we all mingled and spoke to people we identified as potential collaborators. There seemed, to me, to be quite a bit of joining up happening and relationships & network building.

All the talks were filmed but, given they have quite a few to deal with, they’re not available as yet. In the meantime though you should check out some of the resources like the recorded live blog feed, the programme with links to session details and a couple of presentation slides…and keep an eye on the site for more landing. That’s available on the Open Source Junction site on Posterous – http://opensourcejunction.posterous.com/

For a look at the wider work of OSS Watch, visit their site at http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/