The first Driver workshop for companies integrating open source business applications to the Digital Business Ecosystem was held this week in Tampere.

Nemein is one of the companies participating in the project. The plan is to integrate the OpenPSA project management system into the framework together with Jukka Zitting from Yukatan. Once this integration has been done, companies can use OpenPSA to distribute tasks and report hours with their business partners.

The workshop tutorial was run by Bob and Pablo from Techideas in Barcelona. Based on it, Jukka blogged a nice DBE summary.

I didn’t have much to contribute to the technical discussion, as it dealt with Java and Jini specifics, but at least I coded the DBE example service, and Jukka’s laptop was able to query the current date from my powerbook over the Fada P2P network.

In addition to the technical content, Dr Mary Darking from London School of Economics talked about the community structure of the project, and the possible governance models. When we were interviewed for the Drivers project, we gave some complaints about the lack of openness in the project, and it seems that things are improving.

While DBE has lots of challenges ahead of it, including the fact that the funded part of the project is ending quite soon, the possibilities are also very interesting.

Look for more updates in Planet DBE.