"What are we doing today Brain? Taking over the world like we always do."
The sun is shining, the day is bright and now for your enjoyment the Seven crew have announced the registrations are open for linux.conf.au 2007. Check out:
1) The programme is up for you to check out what is happening, who is speaking and start planning your lca experience
2) Registrations are OPEN so register today! Check out the Miniconfs, Partners Programme, Sponsors and more 🙂
Remember, the earlybird prices are only available for a couple of weeks!
Rock on linux.conf.au 2007!
The last two weeks have been madness. I’ve been to several events, met some amazing people, travelled a little and had a birthday somewhere in between.
Firstly, I already mentioned the education.au conference, which has now put up all its talks and recordings, the most interesting of which include Robert Cailliau (one of the pioneers of the internet), Leigh Blackall, and Geetha Narayanan (an inspiring Indian woman talking about technology assisting disadvantaged communities). I met some great people and really enjoyed the speakers.
Then I went to the Go Girls event in Melbourne where I gave 6 talks over two days to about 2000 schoolgirls about why IT and FOSS are such great career options. There were some amazing students there who were more socially and environmentally aware than I was at that age. We had 14 yr olds challenging the Coles home shopping initiative as it might “worsen the obesity problem in Australia”, and others questioning the impact of technology on the environment. I had some delightful girls talk to me after my talks wanting to be programmers, games developers, sys admins, and more! I also got to meet some inspiring people including Jane Treadwell, the Victoria Government CIO who was very FOSS saavy and interesting 🙂 I had a great time and am planning on doing a similar event in Sydney but looking at entire schools (girls, boys, broader age brackets and teachers) and how we can help in looking at IT careers. Anyone interested in this please contact me 🙂
So today and tomorrow I’m at the education au Global Summit as a “thought leader”. It is a great opportunity to talk to loads of people about how Open Source and Open Standards can help education.
Anyway, I was amused when the “thought leader” from Apple spoke to me just before the start and said “oh you’re the Open Source person, yeah I assumed you’d be more technical so lets team up to get our teams to do some more interesting stuff on the website”. 🙂 We will be logging what is happening live on a collaboration site, so it will be fun.
Over this weekend is the inaugral Sydney Moodle conference. I gave a talk yesterday about “Open Source, Opening doors to education” and Lindsay Holmwood (President of SLUG) organised a booth for the weekend/ We’ve already spoken to a lot of people and have been heavily pimping both Open Day as a great holiday event for students and families, and the Education Miniconf which typically includes loads of teachers and school admins.
Sridhar and Andreas have been helping out and it is great to have FOSS represented at events like this because each of those teachers has a long-lasting impact on thousands of students and parents. I think we definitely need to focus more on education.
I spoke about the benefits of FOSS to education, the big picture when it comes to technology and why software freedom is important, first steps in playing with FOSS, and obviously about FOSS and the community. I’ve put the slides online for anyone interested.
Rock on FOSS in education!
I recently recorded an interview with Cybershack, a radio show for geeks/gamers. It was a difficult interview so I’m not completely happy with it. It was all in one take and they didn’t want to give me the questions in advance, but all in all it turned out ok I think. I’m hoping to get them more involved in FOSS and hopefully even get FOSS on the TV show someday 🙂
Check out the podcast of the interview here and it starts about 13 minutes 33 seconds.
The University of NSW CyberLaw Centre will be running a GPL3 Seminar sometime in November. They are after input, speakers and feedback about what needs to be covered. Contact them to have your say to ensure the conference covers issues that affect developers and our community. The CyberLaw centre have been doing a bunch of great events and research about FOSS licensing, copyright and other legal issues. It should be a very interesting event 🙂
I love it when community efforts can lead to tangible positive outcomes!
So now the Opensource WA resource centre is staying open.
Mr Grocott denied there was any threat to funding and said the Government recognised that greater investment in open-source software was needed for WA to stay competitive in a market of increasing importance to both business and consumers.
Rock!
Thanks Rodney for covering the Black Duck event. It was _very_ interesting to get the hard questions thrown around such as how locally relevant and legally localised an American software compliance service can be in Australia. Black Duck answered all the questions quite well and I think have realised that we are a different market. Their services are certainly interesting and seeing a company tackling the issues of software compliance is a good thing, as it is again helping to remove barriers to Open Source.
I sent this out to mailing lists a few days ago, but completely forgot to blog it! 🙂
Software Freedom Day 2006 in Sydney was an awesome day jam packed with great talks, workshops, and fun all round. We had no more than 100 visitors during the day, however many people stayed for most of the day and the retention rates from this year will likely be a lot higher than last year, where we gave out probably 1000 CDs and pamphlets, but got very little follow up participation. We were very happy with the event this year which was a lot of fun.
The entire day saw great talks by all speakers, and all the recordings will be linked from the SFD Sydney team website soon. Senator Kate Lundy gave a fantastic speech which is available on her new (Joomla) website 🙂 It is awesome to see an Australian Senator who is Open Source savvy and generous with her time enough to drive to Sydney to speak to us all!
Congratulations to Stuart Hector who won the GP2X. The competition was to define what Software Freedom means, and it was voted on by the crowd. Stuart won with a short and concise “Software Freedom Rules!” which earned a cheer from attendees 🙂
Location: University of New South Wales – the Main hall in the new law building G04 near the roundhouse. Ground Floor left at the entrance
Date: September 16th 2006
Goal: To introduce more people to why Software Freedom matters, and in particular how it is important to maintaining digital environments we can trust to work and play in. Some good examples where Software Freedom matters is in e-voting software, and Open Standards for long term access to your documents. After all, the basic freedoms we expect are only as free as the technology they are based on. The day will be of interest to any person interested in how technology is changing their lives and freedoms. It will also be fun for anyone interested in technology generally and we will have some great workshop sessions.
Conclusions: This year by running an actual event we reached less people, however those who came were from a broad set of backgrounds (legal, cultural, technical, media and political) and everyone had a brilliant day. We have a brilliant collection of talks that really encapsulate Software Freedom from many different angles.
Sponsors: Venue kindly sponsored by the Unlocking IP Project at UNSW Law Faculty. Event run by the Sydney Linux User Group, Linux Australia and also many thanks to all the speakers who are donating their time and knowledge about Software Freedom. Also many thanks to GP2X for provided a great gaming device as a prize for the day! There is a review of the device available at http://www.localfoss.org/node/245
Thanks: Many thanks to all the volunteers who helped out as well as the people who turned up to help if needed. Particular thanks goes to Silvia Pfeiffer and John Ferlito for keeping the video recording going (which will all be online soon!) even when we had to switch rooms during lunch.
Also to Sridhar Dhanapalan, Andreas Fischer, Chris Deigan, Shane Stephens, Conrad Parker, Andreas Fischer, Andrew Sinclair, Peter Baker, Bruce Badger, Billy Kwong, James Purser, Mark Phillips, and Raphael Kraus for the audio/video work, the morning setup and afternoon pulldown, the and in some cases for being there if we needed more help 🙂
Many thanks to all the speakers and workshop people who gave their time and expertise to making the day awesome!
Thank you also to our sponsors the Unlocking IP project at the Cyberlaw Centre, who organised the venue and helped promote the event. They also gave a great talk and workshop, thanks Professor Greenleaf, Abi, Catherine and Ben! To GP2X Australia who provided a very cool little gaming device for the competition prize. To Linux Australia and SLUG for providing support and CompSoc for helping getting the word out.
Thank you to Software Freedom International for making this day possible and supporting all the teams 🙂
Also a big thank you to my husband Jeff Waugh, who is always a wonderful support and inspiration!
So for Software Freedom Day in Sydney I have a line up of speakers including Senator Kate Lundy. Why would I invite Kate to speak you might ask?
She has been supportive of Open Source alternatives for Government for some time now:
“Lundy has called for Australia to copy overseas moves to examine Microsoft alternatives such as open source.”