what are we doing today, brain?

This Friday I’m helping host Open Education Workshop 2008, an ASK-OSS and NSW DET supported event about all things open in education (Open Resources, Open Source, Open Standards, Open Collaboration, etc). It should be a great event and will hopefully pave the way towards more Open Education in Australia for 2009!

The event includes great speakers from education in Australia and abroad as well as loads of case studies, and time for strategic discussion and planning. Should be great!

I love my husband.

Jeff's Wesnoth addiction error, made just for me.

Recently I was involved in a project profiling awesome women in IT from all around the world. It was a cool project and some really awesome women from all kinds of backgrounds. It was a lot of fun and I’d recommend checking it out. I think there are some great role models there for young people to encourage them to get into IT, and of course it helps fix some of the issues around bad stereotypes in IT

I’m helping them do an easier to browse html implementation of this (probably in Wordpress) but in the meantime, enjoy!

The Oceania profiles

This last 3 weeks have been insane. So much cool stuff, and I keep thinking “I need to blog about this or that, and then not making the time! Below is a quite recap of the cool stuff I’ve done and been involved in over the last few weeks. I have a few lengthy blogs posts coming up to cover some of these in detail, but in the meantime, I AM STILL ALIVE EVERYONE!

New Zealand trip
Jeff and I planned to take a short holiday, unfortunately on the day Jeff remembered he hadn’t got his passport renewed after it was stolen in Malaysia. Argh! I ended up going anyway, spending two days snowboarding at Mt Hutt near Christchurch with a friend (hi Glynn!), then a few days hanging out with Glynn and Jayne in Wellington doing Pilates, training with an awesome Shaolin Gung Fu master, and hacking on OLPC related work in preparation for an upcoming trip for the Aussie OLPC trial I’m helping rollout (more details on that later, so please don’t ask yet! I got to catch up with the Wellington “Friends in Testing” OLPC group and got inspired to start a regular OLPC usergroup in Sydney, to be announced at SLUG in the coming week! All in all a tiring but awesome holiday

Aussie OLPC trial
I’m running Australia’s first serious OLPC trial which has been technically challenging, and has consumed _all_ of my time over the previous few months. It has been awesome and I’ve have just now finished the implementation. The documentation will be made publicly available (and put on the OLPC wiki) in the coming week or two. We’ve basically done a world first of focusing on the remote collaboration and child support element of what the OLPC vision and technologies can deliver, so I’m really excited to be involved in this, and hopefully the lessons we learnt will assist many others We connected up 3 schools, such that specialist teachers can provide support to children in remote areas. Very interesting and the children are thriving with the tools they are playing with. I did a trip to the two remote locations, and we had a film crew come with us who are making a short internal doco, which may hopefully be able to be publicly disseminated over the coming months.

Linuxchix Microconf
Today I’m participating in a Linuxchix Microconf, a bunch of awesome women from Sydney and Melbourne participating in a video conference where people in both locations are presenting to the combined group real time, and it has been great. My talk is in an hour (just finished my slides and the day has covered a huge range of topics. All have been recorded and I believe will be made available for everyone. Awesome job by Alice, Mary, Sun-Hee and a huge thanks to Google for the resources. They provided the venue, videoconferencing, and a tasty spread of catering!

Coming up!

• Documentation and publishing of all OLPC stuff plus kick off of bigger regional community project
• Malaysian Government event on FOSS, and FOSS MY, I’ll be speaking about building FOSS community building and stuff happening in Governments. I’m really excited about going to Malaysia both to see the country, and to learn more about their approach to FOSS, which seems to be pretty cool. I’ll try to live blog during the event.
• Open Education Workshop - ASK-OSS in collaboration with the NSW Department of Education is launching a workshop on Open Education to both share knowledge, and to start trying to understand the needs of the sector, and making a strategic plan for Open Education in Australia. This is meant to be broad to include FOSS, Open Standards, Open Knowledge, and open collaboration methodologies amongst much more. If you are in education and interested in openness, come along and participate!

Anyway, much more blogging to do, and I’ll try to be less slack even though there is so much going on

So after loads of work and testing, we now have a VideoChat app for OLPC that really works Check it out! It is a core part of a trial I’m working on, which isn’t quite yet public news, but more on that soon.

Many thanks to Stephen Thorne for his wonderful efforts and the enormous amount of time he’s put into making it work. Also thanks of course to the Collabora guys who made it in the first place. VideoChat could do with more work, more UI hacking, work on the “whiteboard” functionality idea, and potentially a way to create multi-conferencing, so if you want to hack, get hacking on VideoChat. More details and the download are on the OLPC VideoChat page.

Please note, this app currently only does basic videoconferencing (between 2 laptops only atm) and not the wonderful but still in planning whiteboard functionality on the Videochat webpage.

I am working on a really interesting OLPC XO/XS trial (all to be revealed soon!) where the main lynchpin demonstration is the VideoChat activity. We are certainly looking at the educational benefits, the interesting impact on truancy, and opportunities for disadvantaged kids, etc. However, the VideoChat offers a great way to provide support to remote kids including speech therapy, behavioural therapy, counselling, health services and of course distance education. So we have been working hard to get the VideoChat activity working. It now works online, but not with an XS (unless you disable Squid and have no firewall), so more work to go.

Anyway, I temporarily uploaded the xo to my website knowing I wanted to have it hosted elsewhere fairly quickly. Luckily one of the wonderful Telepathy guys (hi Cassidy!) offered to host it, so it’s all good. Thing is, in the 3 days I was hosting the 8mb file, I had 534 downloads. Woohoo! That is a lot of bandwidth in a very short time I guess it is of interest to a lot of folk out there.

Check out VideoChat. It is very cool but it still needs a lot of work including some prettying up!

Anyway, this is a short one. I have several blogs to catch up on, so sorry everyone!

Today is the day! There are over 600 teams (including the additional Sun events from almost 100 countries participating this year, which is almost double the size of last year!

Over 600 teams for SFD08

There are some really exciting events happening, some of which are highlighted on the new SFD community Planet, but check out the Software Freedom Day website and join in the fun. Even if there isn’t an event near you, you can have your own little outreach effort. Talk to your friends, family and colleagues about software freedom and why it is so important. Today of all days you ahve the world behind you!

For those not sure about what software freedom means, I’ve wrote a little piece called Software Freedom, underpinning your human rights which should hopefully help. There is also plenty more information on the SFD site!

Happy Software Freedom Day everyone!

Simon Phipps has recorded a great podcast about Software Freedom Day starring Simon (Sun), Jono Bacon (Canonical), Josh Sullivan (FSF) and yours truly (SFI). It was a fun podcast, some great conversation and worth checking out. Thanks to Jono and Josh for participation and Simon for putting it all together! Great work everyone!

Today I had a great interview with the wonderful James Purser on the Open Source on the air (OSOTA) show. Check it out! Thanks James, it was a lot of fun

I’ll be posting all the Youtube SFD videos here for everyone to find If you have a blog and want to blog your SFD related news, send the feed to me to add to the new SFD planet!

Software Freedom Day, Richard Stallman in New Zealand

SoftwareFreedomDay 2008 KDE Jos Poortvliet

Software Freedom Week 08 - BVBCET, Hubli-India (Promotional video)

Open Hardware Foundation - Lourens Veen

Softwarefreedomday aankondiging Bas de Lange (check out the SFD shirt preview)