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Editor's note: The news release below was issued today by the office of City of Portland Mayor Sam Adams.

PORTLAND, Ore. - In recognition of the growing impact of the open source software movement and the return to Portland of GOSCON, the Government Open Source Conference, the Portland City Council today proclaimed the week of Oct. 25 as "Open Source in Government Week." That's not the host city's only contribution to the event: Mayor Sam Adams, Chief Technology Officer Mark Greinke and Senior Information Systems Manager Paul Rothi are among those from the Rose City scheduled to speak at GOSCON.

"Last fall, when the City of Portland adopted the nation's first open source software policy, one of our goals was to help attract premier open source conferences to Portland," said Mayor Adams. "Today I am pleased our efforts to bring GOSCON back to Portland have paid off. Portland owes a sincere thank-you to the Oregon State University Open Source Lab for helping bring GOSCON back to Portland."

This sixth-annual GOSCON marks the conference's return to Portland after being hosted in 2009 in Washington, D.C.  U.S. Rep. David Wu will join a top-flight group of presenters and partners announced this week for the conference, which will take place Oct. 27-28 at The Nines hotel in downtown Portland. Congressman Wu will provide comments at the Thursday luncheon just prior to the GOSCON Awards ceremony.

Scheduled to speak at the conference will be information technology leaders from governments around the United States and abroad, open-source not-for-profits and private industry, from the program director for data.gov, Marion Royal, and the CIO of the New York State Senate (Andrew Hoppin) to the director of E-Services for the State of California (Carolyn Lawson) and the director of marketing and business development for IBM Linux open source platform (Jean Staten Healy).

Other prominent speakers include:

• Bryan Sivak, chief technology officer for the District of Columbia;
• Dugan Petty, chief information officer for the State of Oregon;
• Andy Stein, director of IT for the City of Newport News, Virginia;
• David Riley, CONNECT initiative lead, Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology
• Bibiana McHugh and Tim McHugh of the Tri-Met transportation department in Portland;
• Christopher Sean Morrison of the U.S. Army Research Laboratory;
• Gregory Miller of the Open Source Digital Voting Foundation;
• Gunnar Hellekson, chief technology strategist for Red Hat's U.S. Public Sector group and co-chair, Open Source for America;
• J.J. Toothman of NASA's Ames Research Center
• Dan Melton, technical director of Code for America;
• Jonathan Russell of the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School;
• Michael Keating and Nick Grossman of OpenPlans;

The robust speakers lineup and growing government audience for open source software has also attracted impressive support for the educational non-profit event including Accenture, this year's Diamond Sponsor, Gold Sponsor IBM, and Silver Sponsors DLT Solutions/Red Hat, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft and OpenPlans.

For more information on GOSCON, visit the conference website at http://goscon.org/.