Hi,
    My name is Fred Trotter and I am the facilitator for the OSHealthCon.

    It is time to start planning the 2010 conference. The conference will have new dates (Sept 29/30 2010 ) and a new location (United Way CRC, Houston T.X.). We are working on improved video recording and we hope to be better than last years conference in almost every respect. If you have suggestions to improve things please contact me through the link above.

    One of the changes is that we are doing away with invitation codes altogether. They were really more trouble than they were worth. Instead I am implementing and idea that I read about on a blog post (and now I cannot find the post), which is sliding scale pricing. This is like "early-bird" on steroids, signing up early gives you the best price.

    Last year our host could have handled 300 people in a pinch, and we had lots more space than we needed. This year, there is just enough space. Accounting for speakers and sponsors, I have space for 65 people. Our new facility is cheaper, nicer, but also smaller. This is arguably an unconference, where the value of the meeting is generated from the attendees. That means that the conference becomes more and more valuable as people signup. At the beginning, it is more risky to signup. We will not have solidified our anchor or keynote speakers. So who knows? The conference might be a real stinker. If you are willing to sign on early, based on your enthusiasm for the movement, then you get to have a really cheap ticket. Most importantly the fact that you are going makes the conference more valuable. If you wait until you can see what the keynotes will be, or what the anchor talks will be about, and then make a choice to attend, then you should pay much more. After all, the conference is objectively more valuable at that point. The same goes for sponsors, if you signup early, you get a price break. If you signup late, it costs more..

    Of course, I want this to be cheap for people who are -in- the movement. For that reason, I will be sending notices that this signup is open to previous attendees and sponsors first, then the various project mailing lists.

    Just like last year, the point of the conference is to give projects a place to meet and to get communication between projects happening. I will be inviting all of the projects to host a "conference within a conference" if they want to use this conference as a user meetup. Last year, OpenEMR really took me up on this, and we had several good OpenEMR sessions in a row. I would like to extend that offer to the other great projects out there!

    While much of the conference will be unplanned I want to ensure that you can get really solid technical content. I am keenly aware that the Open Source Health Software community has gurus and novices, and I want to be sure that if you are coming to learn you will have solid sessions that give information that would be useful to first-time administrators and clinical users. For that reason I will be pre-planning the keynotes and regular "anchor" sessions. If you would like to do a keynote (where everyone is listening) or an anchor session (where you have a competing speaker) please contact me via my website above. If you just want to showup with an Open Office presentation... thats fine too!
  
Hotel Information

Thanks to Michael Brody for setting this up!

Marriott Courtyard Downtown / Convention Center
916 Dallas Street
Houston TX  77002-6320

Group Name is FOSS
Reservation Phone 800 321 2211

Rate 159 / night


Registration Information

Registration: