Ruby City MATSUE Project: Regional Industrial Promotion through Open Source and Industry-University-Government Cooperation

In 2006, Matsue City, Japan initiated the Ruby City MATSUE Project, recognizing the Ruby open source programming language as an important regional resource.  The  Shimane Open Source Society is playing a key role in the community and the project, connecting people, information, technology and businesses. The society conducts activities such as monthly seminar meetings – the “Open Source Salon”, the “Ruby Study Meeting”, and the “Business Meeting”, to name a few. In order to promote the project and broaden its activities, a U.S. study tour was conducted in 2007 and 2008.  Open source Ruby led to further regional industrial promotion by implementing research projects and personnel training in Shimane University, with support from Matsue City.

In this session, we are going to explain the background of this regional promotion plan put in place to foster local economic development.  Two years on, we are going to analyze a number of influencing factors which affect and execute this OSS-related project.