Category: Government

TechGirls!

Warning, major pink ahead! (Not my fault!)

Yesterday was the first TechGirls event, which is strongly based on the success of events like Go Girls, Gidgits and other events linked from the TechGirls website. We had ~250 girls in the Central Coast with some great speakers, and awesome demo zones. I was looking after a room of girls and ran a Linux gaming demo zone with hardware generously donated by Craige for the day, thanks! The girls loved the games (particularly Super Tux) and I had one girl who came specifically to see Linux come over really excited to see Linux there and keen to get more involved. Awesome stuff!

Every attendee got an Ubuntu CD, and there was information about usergroups, the Australian Development Gateway, FOSS and more on display, as well as the few remaining SFD tshirts, which were all XXXL sized, but still very appreciated 🙂

We are looking to run the first such event in Sydney (of such size) mid next year for about 2000-3000 girls. Anyone interesting in helping out or sponsoring, please get in contact with me 🙂 The current website will be updated with a report soon.

Black Duck event

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.

Software Freedom Day 2006 report

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!

Islam doesn’t hurt people. People hurt people.

I am getting a little frustrated with some of the recent posts about Islam. My best friend is Muslim and she has given me huge insight to the religion and the difference between Islamic practices and the many cultural practices that get confused with them. Many of the abhorrent practices towards women in some countries that try to use Islam as an excuse, draw these practices from much older cultural practices from way before Islam was even around. I don’t believe Islam is a cause of disharmony or suffering any more than Christianity is (and yes, that is a loaded comment). Both are spiritual followings that can and have been taken out of context by extremists which often leads to suffering. I wish people would stop blaming Islam for the acts of a few extremists that are absolutely not respresentative of either the religion or the majority of people following that religion.

I guess that I have a lot of hope for the future. The reason I can have such a strong and wonderful friendship with someone who has a very difference cultural and religious background to me is because of mutual respect. We respect each others views and enjoy the ability to have an open and friendly dialogue about our ideas and beliefs. If everyone could learn some compassion and respect for other people, regardless of the differences you might have with them, then perhaps we can be on the road to a more peaceful future.

it’s easier to hate than to love,
it’s easier to turn your back than extend your hand

We are all the same, all people want security, love, hope and respect. I believe strongly in the FOSS community because people are generally bound by strong values that transcend race, religion or gender. I would hope that our community of all communities can demonstrate to the world that through mutual respect, people from all around the world can come together to achieve great things.

Software Freedom on Triple J

Software Freedom Day will be covered on tomorrows (Friday) Triple J HACK show at 5:30pm. We have about 6 mins, and I haven’t heard the final cut. It went really well and we covered a lot of ground 🙂 I focused on Software Freedom as being about transparent and sustainable technologies underpinning our everyday lives. I think it went really well 🙂

You’ll be able to get the podcast.

I also did an interview for the CyberShack Radio show which will be aired next week. Too late for SFD, but to a great audience. They have asked me to come back on a semi-regular basis and conisdering their audience is power users, gamers, & technologists, it is a great chance to get FOSS in front of people who can really enjoy and get passionate about it 🙂

I’m hoping to get them excited about FOSS enough to do a TV special at linux.conf.au, but I’ll see how we go 🙂

Hooray! On Triple J!

I am meeting with the Triple J HACK producer, Alice Brennan tomorrow morning to do an interview about Software Freedom Day, particularly the Australian events. This will hopefully go to air tomorrow afternoon and there will hopefully be a follow up story also on the Friday.

Any of the SFD teams interested in participating should email me a short sound file with them saying what team they are and what they are doing so I can go in fully armed. I believe she wants to interview a few people as well, but the cooler we can make this story sound, the more participation we’ll get 🙂

Rock on Australia, and rock on Triple J! 🙂