Rob Curley is in the middle of an entertaining and informative session on how to shake up enterprise IT with open source. ("Hacking the Newspaper: How an Open-Source Nerd from Kansas is Revitalizing Journalism") Rob is a highly engaging speaker, and his experience moving from a small Kansas paper to the Washington Post is fascinating. Rob said when he moved to Scripps/Washington Post, his fellow IT colleagues we Rob Curley is in the middle of an entertaining and informative session on how to shake up enterprise IT with open source. (“Hacking the Newspaper: How an Open-Source Nerd from Kansas is Revitalizing Journalism”) Rob is a highly engaging speaker, and his experience moving from a small Kansas paper to the Washington Post is fascinating.Rob said when he moved to Scripps/Washington Post, his fellow IT colleagues were completely “freaked out” by Rob’s renegade band of open source developers (including the lead developer on Samba). They wouldn’t even let Rob’s team plug in their machines to the same outlet in the wall. Old myths die hard….Rob then proceeded to walk through an amazing (open source) system that Lawrence Journal-World built to bring cutting-edge “news” (like local tee-ball news, game cancellations, etc. – 24,000 users as of two years ago when Rob left). It was hugely powerful because it was immediate, local, and extensive. All built with open source technology. The thing that I found most fascinating in Rob’s keynote, however, was not the open source aspect. It was how insightful Rob and his team have been into how people interact with the world. For example, his team noticed in Naples, Florida, that all the retirees had iPods and ate out a lot. So, Rob’s team built a restaurant database that easily sync’d with the iPod. Then they threw in an online database of churches to serve the same demographic. Content is king, and Rob’s team both builds and innovatively aggregates information.Web 2.0 meets open source. Slam dunk. Open Source