Category: Government

Jeff and I are FINALLY taking our honeymoon. A full week off everything relaxing next to the Great Barrier Reef and Daintree Forest. Then Jeff goes off to OSCON and I have another week off for a Kung Fu camp. The break is very needed so don’t be expecting any returned emails for the next fortnight 🙂 We aren’t even taking our phones.

YAY!

So although I love playing with GIMP, I’ve had a bit of a challenge turning this picture into a hackergotchi. If anyone thinks that can do a funky hackergotchi with it you’d make a very happy pipka 🙂

So recently I posted about Software Freedom Day and it has been great to find now 14 groups around Australia who are interested in doing something on the day 😀 although not all of them are on the SFD wiki for Australia and I encourage anyone interested in doing something for the day to add your team there so we can have a rocking national day. I hope that SFD can become _the_ national day once a year when our community celebrates and looks to create a bridge to new people, one day a year when we all work together to give others the opportunities we’ve had 🙂 Ideas already on the table include giving out CDs (and the invaluable conversations that stem from that), installfests, holding LPI exams, a FLOSS booth at the local fete or market, talks and much more. It is going to be AWESOME!

The one I’m most excited about is a dude in Sydney who is keen to do a community centre installfest in one of Sydneys neediest areas. I went to the community centre monday night to help him convince them and demo Linux, and they were sooooo excited. Particularly when we booted into the Ubuntu liveCD in Arabic mode, it means they can teach the elderly in the area who sometimes have only basic english skills how to use a computer and give them opportunities. It was very cool!

So I put this challenge to the entire Aussie FLOSS community. What are _you_ going to do on Software Freedom Day? It is Sept 10, so you still have 2 months to organise something. I’m looking to possibly do t-shirts with the SFD and LA logos for all teams, so contact me if this is of interest to you. This depends on pricing, so if anyone knows someone cheap, let me know 🙂

Rock on Australia

So I had posted my thoughts to the LA list, but seeing everyone else is blogging their ideas, and not everyone interested in on the linux-aus list, I thought I’d blog too 🙂

I believe that LA has started doing more interesting things, and has become
more relevant for the community, and protecting the community rights (such as
the work on the FTA and such). I believe that it wasn’t sustainable for the LA
ctte to do everything themselves, which was starting to happen. Sub-cttes with
specific purposes, such as education, or press, or advocacy could migigate the
issue of sustainability as well as avoiding the issue of taking on an employee
in a volunteer run org. There are many orgs out there that have employees,
however LA can neither afford it, nor really has need, particularly when the
main time sink (LCA) is run by volunteers. Once an org takes on employees,
particularly a volunteer org with a democratically elected ctte, then I think
we would simply see more apathy from the volunteer positions as we have seen
happen in other organisations. Also what tends to happen when an org like LA
gets an employee is that things are not done in the most efficient way, as the
employee is incentivised to keep their job. I guess my example to compare with
is AUUG. Liz does an awesome job with AUUG, however she runs the conferences
and most processes are done on paper. LA has an LCA team every year to run the
conference, and most of our processes are automated, aka no paper. What LA
needs it a ctte willing to put in some time, and 7 people putting in some time
is a lot of time total, in which great things can be done. The main thing is
that if you want to run for the ctte, you are doing so in order to make a
difference, and to put in some effort. If the main role of the ctte is to
ensure the sub-cttes are rocking, maintain governance of the org, ensure all
the legal stuff is done, and to facilitate specific stuff the org has to do as
part of its consitution.

Anyway, I think the sub-ctte model works fairly well, and it means people
who are passionate about particular issues are working on them. We could
certainly pay for certain tasks if we can’t get them done on a timely manner
or don’t have the skills/time inhouse (such as some accounting work), but
taking on an employee means a whole different way of doing things, and
although it may be useful in the future, I don’t believe it is the right
time yet.

The burnout model isn’t such a bad one, having enthusiastic people get
involved, do a great job, and then pass on the job works great for LCA, so
why not for LA? At any rate, LA has only in the last few months started to
take on sub-cttes so I’m keen to see how this pans out before splashing out
on an employee 🙂 I think the model of 2 year terms for exec positions on
the ctte and one year terms for ordinary members positions is a good idea.

In response to Stewarts blog comments about volunteers not being employees,
it is quite a true one, however there is I feel a commitment expected from a
person elected to the LA ctte to follow through with what they agree to do.
If a person doesn’t want to put in any effort, it is fairly simple, don’t
run for the committee.

Warning, I have a small point of anger to vent. I always fly Virgin when I can, I find their service excellent, flights smooth and seating quite comfortable. I was reading their inflight magazine on a flight recently when I came across an article called “Nice girls finish last” which was about a book supposedly to inspire women in their career. One of the suggestions was the following:

Emphasising your feminity can dimish your credibility — which regardless of the context is a pretty awful thing to say. The fact that in many workplaces it can be quite true is more a reflection on backwards workplaces than on women being inherintly unable to be credible unless they act like a man.

There is this horrible habit by women in western societies to complete block their femininity in technical, political, corporate and scientific roles, as they often get labelled masculine anyway and it is the easier road. I was going down this road as well, but then realised actually I really like being a woman. I am proud of my femininity and the terms feminine and strong are not mutually exclusive. The hilarious thing is that none of the fields mentioned above are particularly masculine of themselves, they are just seen as jobs for men. Until we completely get rid of this attitude that these jobs are “untraditional” roles for women, then there is going to continue to be a lifetime of disincentives for girls to get into these roles, and discrimination if they do. What breaks my heart the most is the lack of opportunities presented to girls for these roles, although that is starting to change. I feel very lucky that I had the environment that I grew up in. I thought that women in ICT that had a hard time were the minority until I got into the work place. It really opened my eyes.

I have not yet read the book, and some of the other tips were fairly good. I’m going to get it to see whether this is the feel of the book, or whether Virgin has just managed to pick a pearl that is ridiculous. The book is called “Nice girls get the corner office: 101 unconcious mistakes women make that sabotage their careers” by Lois Frankel.

The way I see it, if you sabotage yourself to get ahead in your career, then you are not really ahead. Women shouldn’t have to hide their feminine nature to be taken seriously, and while we continue to do so, we are simply maintaining an outdated status quo for our children.

For the record, I think Tony is a silly man. I LOVE Hudson Hawk, it is an awesome movie, particularly the song 😉

Last week I had the pleasure of being invited as a mentor to a program aimed at encouraging 14yr old girls to come into the wide world of ICT. I of course took the FOSS angle and showed them the awesome opportunities I’ve had available to me over the past few years. I actually felt very proud of our community, and how exciting it can be for newcomers 🙂 At any rate my time in Armidale went at thus:

• Wed Evening – arrive and give talk to about a dozen locals about the business benefits of FOSS. The crowd ranged from techs to business types, and even the most non-technical person in the room waled out saying “well I’m not sure about everything I’ve just heard, all I know is I should probably be switching to Linux”. A satisfying response 😉
• Thursday – Spent all day giving talks to the 40 girls, and then taking 10 of them for practical exercises in Linux and networking. I used Frozen Bubble and the GIMP for initial addiction, and then using Google as my constant to explain how the internet works. It kept them interested and asking great questions, so I’m pretty happy with how it went. I also talked them through what is actually in a computer. It was awesome! It was funny because each group had to give a presentation at the end of the day, and about 30 mins before it was the due the organiser wandered into our room asking how our presentation was going. We responded that we hadn’t started yet much to her stress, then proceeded to do the longest most entertaining presentation with 30 mins of work 🙂 Yay for all that training in last minute presentations! We were also lucky as we had this great drama student in my group who was selected by the group to be the speaker, then freaked out, then gave an awesome performance 🙂
• Friday – Spent some time with the IT team for the Catholic school in Armidale, who oversee about 1000 pcs in the area, giving them practical advice about FOSS applications and Linux. Then I went to the film school there, which rocks! I met an awesome Buddhist/Taoist guy, and some really creative students, who had been taping the entire event the day before, including an interview with me that they loved and wanted to continue 🙂 Incidently I’m thinking about taking FOSS to morning TV next! Anyway, I introduced them to Blender3d, which I didn’t know about before then but by the power of google found for them which they were excited about. Then I spent some time wandering in Armidale and trying to install Ubuntu on an old laptop with a broken cdrom, and no LAN. Unfortunately, time beat me and I didn’t succeed.

I gave away i386 and powerpc Ubuntu CDs, about 200 all up, and generally got quite a few people excited about FOSS as well as finding about 6 people interested in starting an Armidale LUG. Rock on Armidale! Many thanks to the wonderful people I stayed with, Zonta, Armidale TAFE, the Catholic school and of course the girls.

So I found a little tidbit about Sun chief executive Scott McNealy today, he apparently named his kids after cars, after all he is a car enthusiast. Maybe it’s me, but doesn’t that seem a little weird 🙂 With that logic, my kids would be called Wong Fehung, Jet Li, Fong Sai Yuk and all kinds of weird names. Two points for anyone who can pick the enthusiasm 😉

We’ve already had 5 states want to run something for Software Freedom Day. Melbourne, Darwin, Sydney, Perth and from QLD – Townsville, Brisbane and Bundaberg. Rock on! It’ll be a great chance to draw some really positive attention to FOSS in Australia, and hopefully grow the community in a quality fashion so jump on board!!! Some planning ideas have been posted on the forums site, but I’ll get a wiki up for it ASAP.

Also the e-girls thing I’m presenting at next week has a website up finally, so check it out. It’d be fun to replicate this effort around other schools in the country.

Thanks to Leon for this talk overview of my Code vs Culture talk. I will post my outline and slides tonight 🙂