On October 22, government and private industry experts will debate the issues and opportunities presented by collaborative software development models at the Government Open Source Conference (GOSCON) Portland, Oregon.

This year's Government Open Source Conference (GOSCON) to be held Oct. 15-16 in Portland, Ore., will close with panelists from Microsoft, Sun, IBM and the OpenDocument Foundation weighing in on Open Document Formats.

I’m home in Portland (arguably the open source software conference capital of the world) for the third annual GOSCON get-together. Linux Foundation Executive Director and keynote speaker Jim Zemlin says he may have been mistaken in thinking that attendees were fairly well-versed in Linux and open source.

There seems to be a disconnect between what users want for their computing needs, and what vendors think they want. A glaring example of this was made apparent to me at the Government Open Source Conference (GOSCON) earlier this week.

A new site, UKGovOSS.org, has been launched by Public Sector Forums to encourage discussion about open source and open standards in government. The UKGovOSS.org was created to continue the discussion which started at PSF's Local Government Open Source Conference in April 2009.

Why is it so hard to get governments (especially local government) to use open source software? Here are some ideas discussed during my keynote today in Oslo at GoOpen 2009 for practical steps various people, from citizens to policy wonks to representatives, can do to help get open source in actual use and delivering on its promise (and I know it's not easy)...

When the open source convention OSCON decided to move from Portland, Oregon to San Jose last year, the open source citizens of Portland set about developing their own "conference for developers working with open source technologies and for people interested in learning the open source way."

Governments continue to march toward open source. The Dutch government last year committed to use open standards, the French government has deployed Kubuntu desktops to over 1,000 members of parliament and staff, and a few days ago the United Kingdom government announced an Open Source action plan.

Beyond expressing a preference, does anything else need to be done to make sure that governments that say they are going "open source" really do so?" Quotas -- dictating specific percentages of open source usage -- seem an obvious answer, but in countries that have tried them, open source has not necessarily flourished. One country where quotas on open source use have been instituted is Hungary.