Open source seminars lead to corporate enlightenment

It sounded at first like something out of Scientology.

But I was wrong. It was just open source training. Although the process it launches can lead to corporate enlightenment.

Open Logic is selling seminars to corporations which want to let open source into their workplaces, but feel they need procedures and policies first.

CEO Steven L. Grandchamp called it  "a two part workshop with a workbook. It's a couple of days of training, helping people go through all the things they need to know, and either coming up with answers, giving them answers, or extracting the answers from existing policies."

In addition to bringing this directlly into client offices, OpenLogic also has attorney Jason Haislmaier offering some of this as a Webinar.  It's all part of a process where, instead of confronting companies on open source, OpenLogic leads them by the hand toward the light.

"Here are projects and here are licenses. And here are support entities. You get more uptake and then you find a need to tweak it. The framework can't be a set of handcuffs. It's a guideline." Spoken like a sage.

But Grandchamp also knows that in the end this is going to change more than corporate software policies. (That's the cover of a book on the Scottish Enlightenment at left.)

"What this does is create a framework for allowing some of these other change ideas to catch fire." Once you have an open source software process, in which people are empowered to create better tools, it's just a short step toward an open source business process, in which corporate power flows from the bottom-up.

"There is some fear in it," Grandchamp admits, so the idea is to lead corporations away from the fear and toward the light. Slowly.

I happen to think this is important work. Kvetching alone won't bring corporate America around. And best of all, when OpenLogic does this, it's profitable.  (So is Scientology, I hear. But that's another story.)