Mexico City had a small, but vibrant event on June 21-24th. The event, SG'08 Conferencia y Expo, was produced by Software Guru magazine, and was oriented toward software developers, although I also found that CIOs and other executives were in the crowd. The event was four days, held in a Sheraton hotel in the historic sector of Mexico City, and included two days of tutorials, two days of conference and an exhibit floor of both large (IBM, HP, Sun, Oracle) and smaller companies like Microsoft. While there were only 30 companies represented in the exhibit area, the floor was packed with attendees talking to the vendors and looking at products the one day that I was at the conference.
The conference was not strictly about Free Software, nor even about software development tools. The first keynote was about inspiring your employees to collaborate better and the talk that followed my keynote was about using project management techniques and tools to effectively keep your company on track with both its projects and its strategies. The two other speakers that I heard, Alehandro Paredes (a PhD on Economics) and Mahesh Raisinghani (an expert on Project Management), were excellent, and it was interesting how much we spoke about the same things in all three talks:
o collaboration
o value of the results, not just the cost
o inspiration of the employee/programmer
Pedro Galván, the organizer of the event, told me that Mexico was in an interesting position. For years Mexico had been trying to get many software companies to come to Mexico to develop their products, now the demand for programmers was outstripping the supply and he was busy trying to encourage more people in Mexico to study and develop good software development skills.
Unfortunately I was not able to stay for much more than the three talks and a short tour of the exhibit area, since I had to leave for Bogota, Colombia's Campus Party event, but I did promise to help Pedro with a developer's event in Mexico later on this year or next year.
Finally, I would be remiss not to mention the very nice speaker's gift I received. It was a beautifully hand-decorated and hand-made wooden box with a bottle of a very good warming "beverage" traditionally associated with Mexico, gently wrapped inside. I was told that this was supplied by one of the employees of Software Guru,
and I wish to publicly thank them for it.