#AmmanTT Edition of June

When I first found out that open source is the topic of the second edition of Amman’s very own Tech Tuesday, I thought, “Oops”.

Open source is such a tricky topic. Think about it. It’s really two options for a discussion:

1. A talk about the basics of open source; the pros and cons, the statistics, the history, and why it kicks Microsoft’s butt (that seemed to be the theme yesterday). This option sucks, because you will be pissing off half the very geeky audience for telling them something they can preach just as well themselves. It’s also terrible for the “Tech Tuesday” brand — which, come on, is not Computer 101 at Jordan University.

2. A very technical talk about open source technologies; this option is slightly better, with a much smaller risk of pissed off people. It still sucks though, because you’re risking alienating half the audience, some of whom are not exactly technical, like myself.

That’s why I was very worried, as I walked into the Friendship Hall of Princess Sumaya University.

Fortunately for the audience, thanks to the great team organizing Amman Tech Tuesdays as well as a fantastic list of speakers, neither option one nor option two were a problem. The second #AmmanTT was a huge success.

The speakers were:

George Akra - CEO of Ikbis http://www.ikbis.com/
George spoke about intelligent choices of technology for the Web.

Ashraf Amayreh – CEO at O-Minds http://www.o-minds.com/
Ashraf showcased some OS technologies they are building.

Basem Aggad – CEO at Scooter Express
Basem had a very funny presentation about how his company uses OS.

Kefah Issa - Founder & CEO at FreeSoft http://www.freesoft.jo/
Kefah did what I thought was rather brave by having his whole presentation is classical Arabic. I personally would have preferred spoken Arabic, but that’s just me, many people in the audience liked that.

Ammar Ibrahim – CTO of Al Bawaba http://www.albawaba.com/ and co-founder of Indemaj Technology http://indemajtech.com/
Ammar had an awesome presentation with tons of funny analogies that had the audience rolling with laughter about how Jordan can benefit from using OS technologies.

Of course, for a minute-by-minute review of what was happening at #AmmanTT, you can read my live-blogging post here, or you can watch a recording of the live-stream.

Amman Tech Tuesdays Website

This post was first published here: http://andfaraway.net/blog/2010/06/02/ammantt-edition-of-may/ and it is licensed under a CC-BY-SA license.