So I guess I owe a blog by now 😉 Things have been incredible! Crazy stuff getting organised, projects, travelling, and very little sleep. In a nutshell:
LA – new website is up, after much running about, and there is a fair bit of news and stuff happening. I’m pretty excited about the fact that open source has become an election platform in Australia with all the main parties having an opinion (usually positive) on open source. The way is certainly looking up, and it has been great! I have to say I really enjoy meeting up with people from the community. Right across Australia, and then the world there is this amazing group of like minded, independent, JFDI-driven people, to whom freedom, Quality (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance reference), equality, and doing kick ass stuff is important. I really have felt quite honoured to be able to work for the community with the LA stuff, and I hope that I can continue to stay up the scratch, given I have so much on my plate atm. I feel pretty confident now that whatever happens with LA, there is a great precedent set, and it can only continue to rock on!
Jeff and the awesome Canonical guys have done the pre-release of Ubuntu, a distro based on Debian. I have to say I’m extremely impressed, not only with the distro, but with the company. Hiring some of the best heads in the open source community is a good start, but committing to working with the community, to contributing so much is awesome. I am however again in a situation where I need to seriously consider where my conflicts of interest lie and make sure I keep them well defined. A frustrating but necessary reality. Ah well 🙂
I head up to Brisbane to see the HUMBUG crew this weekend, which should be great! I’ve been promising this for at least a year now, and I’m looking forward to it 🙂 Especially since I am the QLD state person in our new drive to increase comms with all the LUGs.
I also go to the GNOME Boston Summit this year. There are several reasons for this, but mainly because I think that there is a gap in the accessibility development between users and societies that are wanting and able to help out with suggestions and testing, and the development people. I’m hoping to help bridge this gap, with the loose aim of getting Linux right up to scratch in this area. Why? Well it has occurred to me that in our world we have a very unique thing. We are able to create solutions that traditionally have never been financially viable for big companies to do, we have real Quality and care going into our stuff, rather than doing as many software companies do, putting something half-ass out there, and then relying on customer support income to make it stable and quality. Anyway, I want technology to be available to everyone. The whole equal opportunity argument, and using technology to help humans improve themselves, if they so wish, rather than using it purely to make some nameless corp more rich, or to make people slaves, or to further increase the divide between rich and poor in our world. Using technology to increase communication and participation across cultural, physical, religious, age and gender differences, thus leading to increased understanding, increased empathy and tolerance, a stronger focus on care, Quality, equality, community, sharing, and hopefully a less bullshit world all round 🙂
I’m working on a disaster recovery simulation, so anyone needing me, please call me 🙂 I’m keeping odd hours.