I’m leaving on tuesday to speak in the Open Source Forum in Moscow, Russia. The event will be held in the Radisson SAS Moscow from April 27th to 29th, and I will be back in Helsinki on 30th.

My talk, TownPortal: IT Village Project for Danish Communities is scheduled at 5pm on thursday. I will talk both about the actual TownPortal application, a limited CMS system specialized for local communities, and the realities of running such Open Source development project from overseas.

This is the first time I’ve held an actual presentation on the TownPortal project, although there was a BoF session in the OSCOM 3 conference held in Harvard University.

Current version of TownPortal is a stable and easy-to-use system built on top of Midgard CMS. Besides community portals, it is being used for other interesting applications. However, it still runs on the MidCOM 1.x series, and should be ported to the new MidCOM 2.x architecture.

I will try to do this in preparation for the event.

Besides the conference, I’m also looking forward to meeting Alexander, the Belarusian Midgard developer who is now living in Moscow.