Yesterday I attended the breakthrough project elections of the Holland Open foundation.

Holland Open is a Dutch foundation which tries to promote the adoption of Open Source and Open Standards in the Netherlands by getting interested parties together. They do this via networking events throughout the year and by organizing the Holland Open Software Conference (HOSC) once a year (this year on June 11-12).

I was at HOSC in 2005 and I can recommend it as one the more important Dutch open source events. They had a networking event yesterday near Delft at the LogicaCMG office in Rijswijk, which I attended.

The open source scene as far as present in the Netherlands shows a strange mix of implementors, hackers, business people and ideologists. Concepts range from implementing Free Desktops to open hardware, politics and open source business models (like SugarCRM).

On the event a number of projects vied for the honor of being the next breakthrough project for Holland Open (candidates). After an hour of pitches, we chose the projects SoCard and Bricolabs (Generic Infrastructures) to be tonight’s winners.

Generic Infrastructures is —I think— an especially interesting project in that it promotes the concept of free hardware and infrastructures here and in the developing world. Technology is becoming easier and easier and there are more and more possibilities to make tangible the web of information that surrounds us.

This ties nicely into Schulze & Webb’s incredible talk about interaction design earlier and into open hardware hacking. I’m going to order an Arduino myself to see what’s possible.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 21st, 2007 at 20:16 and is filed under event, open source.