Category: Uncategorized

Linux Australia membership explosion

As the LCA registrations opened offering the free LA membership, the membership has gone up a lot, and after Jon’s post there has been heaps of subscriptions to the linux-aus mailing list and to announce. Hooray! So memberships are now up to ~900 (we could almost be a political party two times over ;), linux-aus has only ~370 of that (subscribe now people!) and announce has almost 1200 subscribers! Rock! Now we just need to fence sitters to join 🙂

Remember, nominations for the election at LCA (Jan 25th-ish) will be opening in the next few weeks, so consider where you want to see LA go, and either run for committee or ensure you choose someone who has the same vision you do 🙂

Rock on Linux Australia!

Rock and research!

So this week has all been about international disabled day, and I went to an amazing panel session wednesday night, where I heard the stories of 6 amazing young people. I heard stories about tragic accidents, genetic disorders and misdiagnosed mental health issues, all inspirational and humbling. Anyway, it has risen again the interest from me to introduce Vision Australia to Open Source. I started a discussion about a year and a half ago, but then got distracted. I spoke to a woman called Ebru after the conference who was visually impaired and working for Vision Australia about the opportunity to break down the economic barrier for the visually impaired to participate fully online through the use of FOSS and the collaborative approach. She was quite keen, and I’m hoping to get the conversation happening again 🙂 How cool would it be to break down all the barriers to entry online, from accessibility challenges, education issues, etc etc. Anyway, then tonight I went to a dance party which was specifically for the disability community of Sydney as a helper, which was awesome. I met an awesome chick named Jodi who was in a chair, sharp as a tack and a wicked sense of humor 🙂 Loads of fun!

Now for the research bit! I’ve started working part-time for Macquarie University on a project called ASK-OSS (Australian Special Knowledge on Open Source Software). The project is being funded by DEST under an umbrella of projects called the MERRI projects, and is about creating a reference site for FOSS in research and education. It is AWESOME! We will be showing off the website for the project in a couple of weeks, but needless to say I am stoked to be doing formal research in this way, and seeing that part of the ASK-OSS proposal was to ensure _all_ data be completely openly available, I really feel this will have a broad beneficial impact on the Australian FOSS industry. We’ll be publishing case studies (mainly focusing on research and higher education to start, then hopefully expanding out a bit later), legal information, about FOSS and most importantly, a proper matrix of software and vendors where anyone can add stuff through a web interface, and finally it will be easy to find FOSS applications and who can support them. It is amazingly hard to find appropriate FOSS unless you know what you are looking for or how to judge a successful project, and I’ve been wanting to build such a repository for a couple of years now. Finally! Yay!! Anyway, I’ve posted the scope below, if anyone has feedback or suggestions, please email me at pia (at) waugh dot id dot au 🙂

Tool: Application/company register

Purpose: To make finding FOSS applications and companies that service
them easier. Also to make entries able to be updated by a range of people.

Required information:

Applications – Project name, Short description, Categories (*), Platforms,
Competing Products, Target Market, Rating, Support

Companies – Company Name, Size (ppl) Location, Contact Details,
Products/Services, Online Ordering, Categories, Applications supported (this
could be a link to a particular view of the database showing all
applications the company flagged when they added themself to the database)

(*) Categories – Networking, File Management, Workstation software, System
Management Software, Multimedia – Audio, Multimedia – Video, Multimedia –
Graphics, Office/business Applications, Games, Programming and development,
Server software, Scientific and special programs, Emulators, Other/Humour 🙂
plus ability to add more categories

Description: So the aim is to have a database that anyone can add
applications, but you have to log on to add your company (so that
expirations can be sent after 2 years to the company contact to maintain
freshness) and so that only the logger of the company can change their
company details. I’d love if we can get a rating, so that the person adding
applications can rate them, as well as people viewing the page. In this way
we’d hopefully be able to see popular products easily. Also it’d be great to
be able to display information by category, and by most popular (by rating),
and any of the headings. It’d be great to have a search functionality so
that search queries return results based on any data. This will need to be
to be inputed has to be done through the web interface, similar to the LA
memberDB stuff we did for our membership.

I want to populate it with existing data from the Linux Australia vendor page,
as well as applications from the
Skolelinux site and this site and
any other app we comparison charts we can find. I want the application to be
100% Open Source as I think it’ll be useful to many people, also in other
countries. There are probably existing products that do some of the work.

Suggestions welcome! The other 50% of my working time is being spent working on industry and government contracts. I’ll be announcing my new business in January along with what I’ll be doing, but the short of it is a) FOSS strategic services for corporates and government, b) services for Australian FOSS companies to help them be more efficient and grab the opportunities open to them, c) community work such as the community centre rollout stuff I’ve been getting into, this will hopefully be mainly Government funded, and d) research and consulting work.

Unfortunately, we are bad winners and losers

So I always a most embarrassed about my country around the time when some hugely publicised sporting event comes up that Australian teams are participating in. Don’t get me wrong, I admire athletes and their trainers, and how they can achieve so much, however I am embarrassed about how the average Aussie deals with winning or losing such events. If we win, as is the case in the soccer recently against Uruguay, Aussies are gloating, some are even saying “oh the poor losers, it’s not like they have anything else to do” (yet another silly demonstration by a few individuals who are uneducated in the world), and generally not being in my opinion good winners. We tend to like rubbing it in to our competitors and I find such behaviour dishonorable and pathetic. Anyway, when we lose such events, we find every excuse under the sun rather than concede that the other side may simply be superior for that event at that time. There is rarely a graciousness to Australian participation in sports, and it’d be great if we could be competitive _and_ somewhat humble, or at least gracious in our participation.

Come on Aussies, lets take a little more joy in the participation of sport (and life), and a little less at other peoples expense. Lets try to match our competitive sporting attitudes with a positive and gracious attitude of participation.

Moving and Journos

Well on Sunday, I moved Jeff and I into a new apartment, what a day! Many many thanks to all those who helped out. That means you MIL (Kathryn), Silvia, Sue, Mick, Matt and Mark 🙂 We got almost everything done, and now I’m going to take all week to move the last 10% 🙂

Also, just a quick note to Rodney in relation to his latest post. We love ya Rodney, even if we are also your harshest critics. I think he has a good point that runs deeper than how our community treats journos, in that our community is very _bad_ at appreciating people. We are the first to bite, and the last to say thankyou. I think there’s a message in that for everyone, don’t you? 🙂

Thank someone today! I say thankyou to Rodney for all your efforts in getting FOSS into the mainstream consciousness, and for all your help and participation in the Linux Australia community 🙂

ACS – ICT in Government conference

So yesterday I went to the ACS ICT in Government conference, and was chuffed to see a lot of Open Source mentioned in talks, when it looked like there wouldn’t be any 🙂 In Edward Mandlas opening talk I listened to his points about needing to grow “IP” creation in Australia (he said we barely make any software here, he should check out the Open Source scene), needing to address our trade deficit, needing to become creators and not just users of ICT and asked the question whether we should leverage Open Source more as an industry to solve these and other issues. He only hesitated for a moment, and then very strongly said yes, which was great. Always good to get that kind of affirmation, particularly from bodies that are quite middle ground.

We got to hear about what the Bureau of Statistics in a new project completely based on Open Source, the National Data Network. Unfortunately they’ve made the system a client/server system and the client only runs on Windows, but it is nice to see Government agencies at least satisfying their technical needs with Open Source all over the place 🙂