Category: Government

It is kind of funny when two journos cover the same talk with completely different focuses 🙂 Check out how “Rift divides FOSS community, says Linux body” and then “Linux threatened by ‘polarisation’“. I think I struck something of a chord, hence at the moment writing it up properly.

AGIMO have produced “A Guide to Open Source Software for Australian Government Agencies“. It is an extremely well written document that demonstrates how well the Australian Government have come to understand the opportunties and challenges of Open Source Software. It is also a product of the good work of many members of the community who have gone out of their way to articulate and explain the concepts of Open Source to the private and public sectors. An awesome job AGIMO, and rock on to LA, OSIA and AUUG for their combined work in taking the love beyond the community. I highly recommend reading the document and learning how to approach Government and other audiences about OSS.

Thanks for putting up more wedding photos to Mary and Catie!

I can honestly say I have had the most AMAZING week! On Sunday Jeff and I married, which was fantastic! Honestly the most amazing day and we felt so proud to be sharing it with so many people we love. At the ceremony, afterparty and now at LCA. We will be absolutely blogging any more photos we get, all the professional ones will come printed and on cd, so they’ll go up. Now I’ve a real incentive to get some to put all our photos in online 🙂 What to choose…

I have a personal plea to the interweb at large, as of Sunday I have lost my “Pia Smith” Googlejuice. Many thanks to those who have helped contribute to getting it back.

LCA has ROCKED WAY HARD!!!! I have had heaps of fun, given three talks (two to gov and one to the main conference) and I think I’ve achieved what I set out for. A whole raft of people are inspired to kick ass and a lot of issues I’ve been concerned about are off my chest 🙂 I really love this conference, and the community. Being able to have 100 thought provoking and incredible conversations with people who have similar values, and similar concerns is nothing if not mind blowing. I thank every single person who makes this event what it is, the organisers who have put on an amazing conference, the sponsors, the speakers, and of course all the attendees.

At my talk I spoke about the 5o’s. The idea that many of us are stuck somewhere between the business focus of Open Source and the inflexibile extremeness of Free Software. The things I care about are:

• open source
• open licence (as defined by the OSI)
• open standards
• open knowledge
• open community

My good friend AJ came up with the best possible description for this. OPEN LOVE! (Note – AJ is walking around saying I suck at the moment because I illustrated the concept in my talk with a picture of him in swimmers 😉 Ironically enough when googling for “open love” (not recommended) you’ll find a reference to loving open source, rock on! I also spoke about the code vs culture issue we have, but I’ll blog about that when I put my slides up in the next couple of days when I add all the feedback from yesterday into it.

Pia Waugh!!! Yay googlejuice!

Michael Still, champion that he is has decided to run a minibus to Yass for the wedding party. Check out his blog for details. The minibus runs from Canberra Sunday afternoon.

You know when someone says something specifically bitter and you are just a bit stunned? That happened last night with what was really a very ridiculous comment, and I was unfortunately too much in shock and embarrassment to even neutralise the moment, resulting in a very long and awkward silence in a room of people.

The buses between Canberra and Yass are certainly catered towards people going _to_ Canberra. Sorry for any confusion with anybody, it seems that on Sundays this isn’t really an option to get to Yass unless you get there in the morning. Car pooling, hiring cars, and other such foo is probably the best idea.

Sorry! It’ll be worth it though 🙂

For anyone stuck and without a way to get to/from Yass for Sunday, there is a bus available. Transborder buses, so please stop asking us how to get to Yass 🙂 If Jeff and I organised that for everyone, we’d never have time to get married ;P

I am breaking a record here! I drove to Canberra from Sydney (3.5 hours) yesterday at 2 to get to the WAVE seminar, at which I gave a short introduction as to how Open Source and Open Knowledge can benefit socioeconomically disadvantaged peoples, in this forum, particularly women, and it went down really well. I had a lot of interest, and hopefully we’ll ahve some awesome Linux rollouts to rural Australian communities who are severely disadvantaged in terms of education, online services and communications. When I get more information I’ll be spamming the SLUG mailing list as well as other LUGs around the country for people keen for some awesome road trips! I’m expecting this will be a fantastic opportunity to not only teach more people about Linux, but to bring real opportunities to people who need them.

Anyway, back to my record, I drove back to Sydney this morning at 3:30am, after 4 hours sleep and I go back to Canberra this afternoon. Yay sanity! Anyway, I’m getting some people psyched in Canberra for the Open Computing in Government (but I still like to call it the OSG conference, otherwise lots of pollies have no idea what I’m talking about 🙂 ) co-conference, and I managed to convince my company to be a sponsor. Go team! I am really getting somewhere with them, and I’m so proud to have a large Aussie company joining to ranks of OS providers in Australia, especially as we are developing awesome relationships with other smaller Aussie companies, and actually bringing a lot of what works in the Open Source world to the corporate world. Who knows, I may be able to change corporate culture for the better 😉

The wedding is only a week away! HFSNW!

Well, Jeff and I are finally getting married next Sunday the 17th April. Yes you heard it right, the day before LCA 🙂 We wanted to make life easy for our community friends, particularly the ones from overseas who were going to be in Australia then anyway. So the ceremony itself was quite restricted for numbers, however we are going to have a big celebratory BBQ after the ceremony on the Sunday evening starting at 6:30pm. Anyone in the area should certainly come along and say hi. I’ve even agreed to continue wearing my dress for a while into the evening, so all the disbelievers can see 🙂

The party will be in Yass, which is about 45 minutes drive from Canberra, and there are a bunch of other LCA people coming, so ask around for car pooling and the like. If you are interested please email us for the address and such. We are limited to 200 people so get in fast 😉