Together with Puzzle ITC we created the first poster of the OSS Roadmap which is now in print (A1-size, edition of 500 prints) and will be ready to be distributed by next week. Hurry up and order one of the 100 posters that are mailed for free!

My tonights activity before the soccer game was a short introduction course into LaTeX. Thanks to ETH’s internal education system I could join a basic course, taught by Tobias Oetiker. So based on his smart structured LaTeX-manual I learned a lot and generated a load of DVI files (device independent file) which inturn could be translated easily to a PDF.

As I’m now for almost half a year a doctoral student, I’m starting to narrow down the area of my dissertation. The first result is some sort of working title, “Corporate Knowledge Sharing”, focussing on the question why and how firms open up sources of knowledge and how they can create something like communities for their ventures, thus deriving competitive advantage for their businesses. As this is still a very large field of research there will be the further need of focusing. However, as at the moment I’m still in the creative phase of topic culling, I’m now gathering cases in practice where companies and individuals share or tap knowledge, create new projects or innovations and even try to form communities for them. One interesting news item I picked up today is the plan of mobile phone companies joining together to create a common Linux software platform for their devices - definitively an interesting case study in a year or something!

On Saturday I returned from my first academic conference, the Second International Conference on Open Source Systems in Como. Besides listening to interesting presentations and getting to know very nice people from all over the world, I especially enjoyed the Workshop on Public Data about Software Development on the last day. Although it exists already for some time, Gregorio Robles kindly introduced me to their CVS mining and analyzing software CVSAnalY, which next to other functions produces such nice measurement overviews as the one of KDE. So in future, I’ll definitively follow their interesting research blog at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos quite closer!

Today was a great, busy day. First thing this morning was Ubuntu’s announcement of “Dapper Drake”. Although it downloaded me today only 5MB because I’m already working with this release since a month as beta, it’s still fun to read all these happy reports ;)

Second, I went to HP’s Open Source and Linux Roadshow as a representant of /ch/open to care for our booth. Good for us we had also some news to present, the new sponsorship of the OSS Roadmap by Puzzle ITC and the Call for Participation for the OpenExpo later in this year.

And thirdly, Georg von Krogh started the new series of Brown Bag Research Seminars by giving an introduction into the private-collective model of innovation. It was a great success, about 30 PhD students, postdocs and professors followed our invitation.

So now it’s time to go to bed, tomorrow we’ll be heading towards Germany.