Pia Waugh – “most awesome talk”

I’ve been speaking about FOSS at a lot of non-FOSS conferences recently, including the Go Girls event in Perth, a few school events, some NGO conferences and to some Universities around NSW. I’ll also soon be speaking at another couple of events aimed at school kids, Software Freedom Day in Sydney and strangely enough at a “telecentre” conference. Apparently a conference about the deployment of telecentres around Australia, a great place to talk about FOSS for sustainable networks 🙂

Anyway, I was very pleased to find out that my talk was rated the “most awesome” at the 2006 Go Girls event, as judged by about 2300 school girls. Rock on! Perhaps we’ll have a few more young people getting into FOSS from Perth 🙂

If every person in the Australian community did just one outreach project a year, even if it was just installing OpenOffice for someone, then imagine where we can be just a few years from now. In Australia, I estimate we have around 5000 people in our FOSS community (LUGs, developers, sysadmins, advocates, etc). 5000 people influencing 5000 people who in turn talk to their friends about it…. We could probably reach most of Australia in about 5 years if we tried 🙂