We’ve tried various ways of building conference communities online in the past, and most have relied on a third party site. And usually these sites have followed a sort of bizarro Pareto rule — for the 20% of the product that integrated a twitter feed or flickr gallery the other 80% forced and encouraged the typical walled garden approach. Whatever integration was just sweetener to get another signup. 

This time we’ve done it a bit differently. Clay Whipkey, our technical director, took the open source conference system we are using to post schedules, sponsors and paper lists, and after a week of little sleep, created a plugin for the system that allows the front page to aggregate all #ocwcglobal2009 material from all blogs indexed by Google, all flickr pages, tweets, etc. And as an added bonus it is lightly integrated with the Cloudworks system (though right now that integration is limited by the lack of a lower-level RSS).

You can check it out here. Be gentle with us, there are still some holes on the site, we put it up in the course of one of the longest weeks in my recent memory (while trying to assemble everything from the program to the keynote). There are some holes. There is some missing content.

But all the code that Clay has put into that front page is designed as a plug-in (and will be released after some tweaking), and the base software (which is designed primarily to run registration and the submission review process)  is available open source from OCS. Hopefully this is a start to getting people off of Crowdvine and the like, and out of the walled gardens.

(Ignore the login link at the top which is really only for people who are uploading schedules and conference materials).

Anyway, let us know what you thing. And tag related content OCWCglobal2009.