Last week I spent two days at a conference called Going Public, a conference about women in the public sector and politics. It was fantastic! Firstly I got to hear extremely eloquent and strong speakers such as Cheryl Kernot (a wonderful woman completely misrepresented by our ridiculous media, she knows Linux too :), Julia Gillard, Tanya Plibersek, and Lynette Riley-Mundine. I saw Australias youngest Mayor, Janie Dickenson, and met many successful women in Australian politics. One of the most interesting talks was from Christine Milne, a Federal Greens senator, who basically said that womens issue were not on the political agenda anymore, and called for women in the public sector to try and make life better for all women rather than just succeed in their own careers by working around the issues. It was a really interesting few days, and I feel pretty inspired 🙂 I have to say my studies in politics at Uni have always been very useful in my work and in trying to communicate the importance of Open Source in solving real social problems. I think that if politics were taught better in school, as in the reality of current events and the effects of politics on our everyday lives, then perhaps we would have a more participatory community, and potentially a more reflective government. I have to say I only started getting into politics about 4 years ago, before which I was oblivious seeing it as stale and boring. That is so far from the reality, and I like to hope that if we had more average Aussies taking an interest in how Australia is run, then perhaps we wouldn’t be seeing such conservatism, and biased representation of our national community. Why is it that older, heterosexual, Christian, married, white males, who probably only make up ~16% of our totaly population are making the decisions for all of us? So much for representative politics 🙂