I was on an interesting panel at the OSBC West yesterday titled “The Open Source Community Imperative: Methodologies, Mechanics, and Metrics”

Things began on a good note when, earlier in the day, I read that Oracle bought Sleepycat. Since Sleepycat CEO Mike Olson was scheduled to be on my panel, that was bound lead to some informative exchanges. Ultimately, I think Mike did a great job talking about the sale. I agree with him: at the end of the day, the best way to make sure Sleepycat continues to do the right thing for the community is to watch them closely and make sure they’re walking the walk. Then again, it’s not like he was facing a hostile crowd.

From the eBay perspective, I focused more on the platform we open up using Web services than the straight-up traditional open source software we distribute (or are working on distributing). I think open platforms and data will be as important in the next decade as open source software was in the past one.

Rather than hear what I thought about the talk, check out Ross Mayfield (of Socialtext) and Christine Herron (of the Omidyar Network) had to say.

I just submitted by proposals for OSCON and NYPHPCon. I hope they get accepted, as I’m quite excited about both shows.

OSCON is my favorite conference of the year. There’s nothing else that provides such a wide range of interesting speakers and topics. I love learning about PHP, but I find it even more fascinating to see what the Perl and Python and Ruby guys are hacking on, or pick up JavaScript and AJAX tips, or heckle the Java programmers. :)

The past two years, I’ve been on the OSCON PHP track conference committee, so it was my job to write friendly reminders in my blog. I’m not doing that this year, so you can count on this as a unbiased plug for the show.

There are lots of topic areas beyond PHP, such as Web applications and Security, so you don’t need to be a PHP guru to submit. You just need to be doing something that other people will find interesting that you can share in an interesting way. The key is that when a conference attendee reads the description of your talk in the program that they say: “Cool! That sounds neat. I think I’ll go hear this talk.”

Last year, I wrote a short post about getting your conference proposal accepted. That’s just my personal philosophy, but I think it holds mostly true for all good conferences. There’s always the “I want the biggest names I can get” philosophy, but if that’s the case, then there’s nothing you can do about that anyway.

Proposals are due Monday, so hurry up and submit.

It’s the first year for NYPHPCon, but Hans and the whole NYPHP crew are great guys, so I know they’ll put on a teriffic show. When I still lived in NYC, I attended NYPHP user group meetings on a semi-regular basis, and they were even kind enough to let me present once or twice.

In fact, I gave my very first Web services presentation to NYPHP back in February of 2003. I don’t know if eBay would have hired me as a Web service evangelist if I hadn’t started down the path of learning about Web services for NYPHP. So, I owe them a big debt of thanks.

Besides, New York City is the best city in the world. Sorry Bay Area neighbors. Although, I certainly don’t miss the 22.8 26.9 inches, or .58 .68 meters for my non-US readers, of snow that got dumped on the city last night. Have I mentioned it’s 65 degrees (18 celcius) today in San Francisco?

Oh, I almost forgot to mention what talks I submitted. All of them will have an eBay theme, but none of them are 100% eBay advertisements:

• Consuming Web Services Using PHP 5
• Dirty secrets of PHP 5’s ext/soap extension
• Abracadabra and hocus pocus: Magical methods and PHP 5

I really like my abstract for the that last talk:

PHP 5 provides a number of so-called “magical methods,” methods that are automagically invoked to secretly manipulate objects. These __methods() are cool, but when, if ever, are they actually useful? Using an eBay Web services SOAP client as my example, I’ll demonstrate how a little slight-of-hand and misdirection leads to shorter and more intuitive code.

Right now, my eBaySOAP code uses __construct(), __set()/__get(), __call(), __isset(), __toString(), and the IteratorAggregate and ArrayAccess interfaces. If I can get Dmitry to add the hook he promised to ext/soap, I’ll also add __wakeup(). I’m sure there are a few more things I can do, but the trick is to only implement useful and intuitive methods, so we’ll see.