Category: Uncategorized

And now for something completely different…

An awesome job by Amy Jiang on this poster depicting the recent Canonical visit to China. I knew Amy from the Beijing Linux User Group (你好！) when I was in Beijing in 2004, and she is one of the coolest people I’ve met 🙂 I put her in contact with Canonical when I heard about the Asia tour, as she is a great translator, FOSS person, and the IT manager for the UNDP project in Beijing! That is Amy on Mark’s right (your left). Also in the picture is Malcolm (far left), Hande (far right) and Sarah (second from right) from Canonical.

I’m looking forward to going back to spend some time in China to continue my Mandarin studies. Rock on Amy and a nice translation 🙂

“United the Workers, the Farmers and the Army, Keep Working on Ubuntu Till Success!”

PS – Hi to everyone else in Beijing LUG – Simon, Richard, Jenny, Beorn, Michael and everyone else!

I would like to call upon the FOSS community to not bring their society stipulated issues to our world. We are in a very powerful position at the moment where we have defined a society bound by common values of freedom, personal empowerment, transparent and accountable governance, and most importantly, recognition based on what you contribute to the community as opposed to your money, position, sex, age, beliefs or whatever else. We have created an environment where great people can be great, whereas in their own societies perhaps they would be limited or self limit due to various ridiculous status quos or cultural assumptions.
I believe we have something so powerful that we can change our societies all over the world for the better. I am personally frustrated every time I see someone who doesn’t pull their weight get ahead in Australian business or Government, but in the Free Software community, how people contribute is usually quite transparent, and thus if they don’t do the right thing by their community, they simply don’t get ahead. Similarly, if they suddenly do the wrong thing, the community can see and react accordingly.
I would like to call on all FOSS contributors whether you be coders, advocates, sysadmins, translators or whatever to embrace fully what we have, and not bring into our community things that can tear it apart. We make a choice to bring those issues in, and from my perspective, we should be aiming higher than that.
So what can you do today to help? Encourage a diverse range of people to participate. If you see a racist, sexist, or any other negatively biased comment/joke, slap it down. If someone tries to gain favour by who they are rather than what they’ve done, ask them to prove themselves. Together as a community we can continue to flourish as a global community that crosses national, cultural, religious, gender, age and all other boundaries, bringing people together to do great stuff without all the bullshit 🙂

Last week I had the pleasure of participating in the inaugural Open Source Tasmania FOSS forum, which saw about 190 people attend as well as a good industry/Government focus session the night before. It was a great event, and I’m really pleased to see the Tasmanian Government understanding the value or FOSS, largely due to the FOSS businesses who came up with OST and started talking to the Government about how FOSS can drive the local economy. Very good work to the OST team, in particular Carole who coordinated the conference and Sen who came up with OST.

Also, the TasLUG team are preparing an lca bid which is fantastic! Having lca in Tasmania would be very pretty, and it is somewhere not many speakers have travelled too.

On that note, the initial lca2007 website is up 🙂

I’m unfortunately not going to Brazil next week, and so will have to save up my love of the country and people till next year, when I will certainly be returning there. It is a great pity, but sometimes circumstances work against you. It is probably a good thing as I have been running very busy over the last few months without a break, and without the time to focus on my new business which is coming along well 🙂

I was really happy to see today that Dahna McConnachie from Linuxworld covered my short presentation on building a FOSS strategy for business at Linuxworld last week. I was a little nervous and wasn’t sure if I got my points across ok, but going on how Dahna reported it, I did pretty well at getting my points across 🙂

“Balancing commercial interest with community interest is important for businesses looking at open source, said open source consultant Pia Waugh”

Very happy with that story. We managed to get a lot of positive press around Linuxworld Australia and I’m looking forward to participating next year. In the meantime I am also on the committee for linux.conf.au 2007 and we are starting to ramp up our organising, even though that event isn’t till January. It is certainly lining up to be a very busy year!

So it was great to have Peter Quinn at Linuxworld, he is a sweet guy and really understands FOSS. Unfortunately his tongue in cheek comments about sandals and ponytails was taken quite over the top, so we arranged this little photo to show the guy is a great ally of FOSS and that he has a sense of humour 🙂 Thanks for playing along with us Peter!

This is about the cutest thing I’ve ever seen! Sara’s kids made some Pia and Jeff penguins!

This reminded that I hadn’t yet posted Edale’s (Bdale’s wonderful daughter Elizabeth) lentil impersonation of Jeff and I at our wedding last year