Howdy, folks – I’m in Portland, OR at OSCON: O’Reilly Media’s annual gathering for the open-source community.

The convention itself starts tomorrow, but there have already been two days of tutorials and summits. I caught today’s cloud computing summit, which included a series of debates with a jury deciding such issues as whether open APIs prevent lock-in, whether we need standards in The Cloud, and whether the tarsier is a cute mascot or the cutest mascot.

One little touch that I love: the ribbons you can add to your badge. With most conventions, that’s fully in the control of the organizers: you get a ribbon that says “Sponsor” or “Speaker” or “VIP” if and only if you merit it. At OSCON, you get your choice of everything from “Database Doctor” to “We’re Hiring”… or a blank ribbon and a Sharpie.

There’s no question, though, that this conference’s main target audience is people whose tech chops exceed mine by a light year or so. That’s great – I like to feel challenged, and there’s no question most of the sessions I’m attending will do just that. And that makes me especially delighted that Alex and I will be presenting tomorrow on how we’ve been taking Social Signal’s business processes open, and the surprises, pitfalls and windfalls that we’ve encountered.

More coming tomorrow.