Even without deep technical knowledge or a fat Rolodex, you can be a community superhero. In this talk from the 2009 MySQL Conference, Sheeri Cabral, the 2007-2008 MySQL Advocate of the Year, shares some pointers on things anyone can do to help the technology and community of your favorite open source project.

The Open Invention Network is a collaborative enterprise formed to promote Linux, and protect the open source community from the threats of patent assertion and litigation. Keith Bergelt's job as the CEO is to ensure that the edges of this network are not intruded upon, and that the self-regulatory nature of open source has an opportunity to spread beyond Linux and the 300 plus programs that exist today.

Scott Ruthfield describes Jiffy, a new open source performance measurement tool for measuring true client-side performance of web sites. Ruthfield identifies the components of website performance problems and the decision process that led WhitePages.com to develop their own solution. Jiffy's goals, components, and a sample implementation provide a thorough introduction to the toolkit.

If you're looking for a Linux initiative that is truly open source, where you can download the source, contribute without censorship, and drive the project, check out Moblin.org. The Moblin project was conceived in order to drive innovation on the new breed of Internet-enabled mobile devices, to foster community participation, and to avoid locking into a proprietary platform. Dirk Hohndel, the helmsman, woos open source developers to take this platform to its next level by participating in the community.

As Business Intelligence becomes more and more popular as a way for companies to achieve an advantage, some companies ahead of the curve are adopting open source BI software. Analysts have not been positive in their predictions of open source use, but they may be mistaken. Mark Madsen describes the results of his study showing who is using open source BI software, why they're using it, and what the benefits are. His results indicate that while open source BI is not widely accepted yet, its users are just ahead of the curve.

Christine Peterson is a founder and Vice-President of Foresight Institute, and focuses effort on educating the public on nanotechnology issues. In this emotionally-charged presentation at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, Peterson lays out the potential privacy concerns of using nanotechnology and closed-source software to monitor for a future terrorist attack.

MySpace, Flicker, YouTube, and Facebook are big brands and major movers in the commercial, social networking world. In this 2008 Nonprofit Management Institute talk, an event convened by the Stanford Social Innovation Review, Jeff Patrick of Common Knowledge shares how nonprofits can use such tools--and customize their own--to capture constituencies and raise funds. He further shows where social networking is headed so that nonprofits can begin to incorporate it into their long-term horizons.

New Web software applications perform and are used differently. Consequently, the hardware and infrastructure of yesterday is insufficient. In this presentation from the O'Reilly Velocity Conference, John Fowler of Sun Microsystems discusses the new Web application architecture components that Sun is working on, and how they work with the latest Web software.

David Glazer says that people are the killer app of the web. That is, finding ways to connect people easily and seamlessly is the next great wave in computing. There are barriers to overcome, but the desire to see it happen is great. In this presentation Glazer offers a snapshot of how we got to this point and where things will need to go from here.

Chris Messina has been an advocate of an open, social Web for many years. In this talk at the Graphing Social Patterns conference, Chris outlines potential problems with the current "walled garden" ideology of the major social networks and how the DiSo project aims to tackle them.