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I’ve been attending Microsoft’s annual global sales meeting in Atlanta this week and find myself in a painful situation where I now have only a week before I need to be in Redmond for several other meetings, including the DII Workshop on SP2 and ODF.

My colleague Bryan Kirschner, Microsoft’s Director of Platform Community Strategy, has managed to talk me into using the week by spending it at OSCON in Portland, including taking part in an event on Monday by the name of Participate08. It didn’t take much, he suggested it, I jumped at the opportunity!

Brian has a post up about Participate08 which contains several links for anybody who wants to find out more about the day.

The reasons I think it is cool are mostly personal as well as professional. The work of Harvard’s Karim Lakhani (our facilitator in the morning and moderator in the afternoon) has been one of the biggest influences on my perspective on free and open source software (…that’s kind of a pun…). I haven’t been familiar with panelist Siobhan O’Mahony’s work quite as long, but she is one of, if not “the” leading researcher on how firms work with open source communities. Her work quite literally helps me figure out how to do my job. Panelist John Wilbanks runs the Science Commons project at Creative Commons, an endeavor I think has a good solid foundation in elements of brilliance. Speaking of which, Zack Urlocker is a super smart guy. And Allison Randal has her own standing tagline with me as “one of the most thoughtful people in FOSS.”

In all it should provide for a interesting set of conversations, and for me personally a great opportunity to learn more more about community participation. The panel looks excellent, and I’m looking forward to hearing what everybody has to say…

I would also love to meet any of my readers who are there next week, especially if you are working out of the Asia Pacific region. Jump to the contact page and flick me a mail.