My notes on Mr Moodle's keynote!!

Martin firstly spoke about the Blackboard takeover of 2 Moodle partners
The staff in the 2 companies are very committed in Moodle.  There are two ways of looking at it.  We can see it from the point of view that Blackboard has taken some of the market OR that there are now moodle people within Blackboard.  We will wait to see what happens!  Moodle remains independent and does not rely on anything in blackboard's control.

Then he moved onto developments!!
There are 68000+ installations around the world.
Martin can see that there is a move from traditional teaching to open web.  There is still a need to be online spaces for school / work / college.  "There is no one tool that suits everyones's needs" but moodle tries to be a "Swiss army knife"!  Moodle started is a revolution but it is now in a evolution stage.
Martin believes that these need to be a flexible and customisable environment (rather than open / social web).  For what it's worth - I agree!  

For developments there is a focus on: 
Plugins

Processes

Usability: Including solving user frustrations, some scroll of death solutions to hopefully be in place for 2.3 (course setting option: course sections on one page or one per page).  Every release from now on will have some focus on usability)

Integration. Some work on repositories for the future.  It will be possible to select a file to be chosen from a private repository (such as alfresco) and it will be linked to but not copied (live updating - yey).  It could also be possible to put a file in private files and put into 3 courses.  When you update in private files it will also update the other files!
Portfolios, especially Mahara integration, will continue development.
Open badges - enable certification (where validity can be checked) is something being looked at.

Book going into core in 2.3! 

Possibly the option to backup and restore user data from 1.9 to 2.x in 2.4 but it is a lot of work and would have to be the sole development. A quick poll in the room suggested this is needed by many.

Some good stuff to look forward to!!