This past Saturday, approximately fifty members of the enterprise systems management community got together in Austin, Texas for their own BarCamp. This event, BarCampESM, allowed for an informal gathering at which to brainstorm and create some real change in their industry. The BarCamp event format has proven to be popular with the technology community for its free, open, and inclusive setting, and in this context it seems to blend some open source ideals with a usually "commercial" enterprise audience.

The event's organizers, William Hurley of BMC Software, Mark Hinkle of Zenoss, and John Willis of Zabovo, seem to be on to something. Will Hurley (known to most as whurley) filled me in on some of the day's accomplishments.

Today has already produced
several major announcements including:

1. The release of the new Open Management Consortium website -
http://openmanagement.org

2. The announcement that the OMC now has over 1000 members

3. The announcement of two new open standards projects:

- OMC Design Patterns
- OMC Open Agent

The two projects (especially the design patterns) are very interesting
as we have contributors from both proprietary vendors and leading open
source projects at a consensus on the need/direction for these
efforts.

This is a revolutionary event that has already become the focal
point/catalyst for the dramatic change to effect an industry that has
remained stale for far too long.

For more information about this and hopefully future events see:

The main BarCampESM wiki

Whurley's original blog post on the event

More about BarCamp