Category: Uncategorized

For anyone looking for all the Linux Australia podcasts, they are all available in the one place. Rock on James and his lovely wife Karin!

Today I met someone who taught me a lot. She is a homeless woman in Glebe, and has been living on the streets for about 7 years. As I walked past she asked for a $1 as she is living on the streets because of domestic violence. This struck me and I asked if she’d had dinner (this was about 7pm) and invited her to eat as I hadn’t yet either. We ended up talking for sometime. She was really into the idea of computers, and had a computer she had found but couldn’t sell as it was locked (windows login) and her sister wouldn’t buy it unless she could use it, so I gave her an Ubuntu CD, and she was stoked!

Anyway, she is an Aboriginal woman from the Griffith area who was taken from her mother as a baby and brought up by foster parents in Sydney. For those unaware of this practise, it was the policy in Australia in those days to take young Aboriginals from their natural mothers for a “better” life, a disturbing and destructive practise that obviously still has victims dealing with the consequences today. At any rate she felt she had a good upbringing as the foster parents treated her well, and hated her natural mother. She is 34.

She had a partner who apparently still stalks her and beats her up. She can’t get into refuges for women, as they prioritise for women with children, and she can’t get a restraining order against him as she is homeless. So she can’t get assistance or protection against someone who decides to hurt her for whatever reason. I had not thought of this loophole in the system, and it disturbed me greatly. Many homeless people in Australia don’t receive any government benefits as they don’t have an address to collect them from, another loophole.

She told me about her aspiration to write a book about the Queen of the Land and the King of the Sea, bringing a traditional Aboriginal story to print. She draws and told me how she had been given $10 for her birthday by a sister, and had spent $9.98 on a huge set of textas on sale at the store. Before she left, after eating maybe 1/4 of her meal (“That is a HUGE amount of food for me sister!”) she made me promise to come find her again when she writes her book to see it. I thought she meant to buy it but no, she just wanted me to see she could do it. She had a brother hanging around by that stage and had to go, she gave me a massive hug and thankyou before leaving and immediately giving the brother the leftover food, ancouraging him to eat it. At any rate, it has really made me think about yet another perspective, and set of social issues that it is easy to discuss over coffee with friends, but not easy to understand from the inside.

What was amazing was when she relaxed a bit and made or listened to a joke, her face lit up with this inner light, and she was so hopeful. She had a beautiful face, but then she would bring the walls up again, and have fear, pain and uncertainty etched on her face.

So there has been another flare-up of the trademarking the word Linux in Australia idea. LA are getting some very mis-informed hate mail about how it is wrong to trademark the word Linux because it is wrong to charge for the use of the word Linux. I want to clarify something from my perspective:

• Do I think it is wrong for Linux Australia to trademark the word Linux? No. We are in dangerous times, and we need to ensure that the trademark is owned by a non-profit community organisation with a community elected committee to avoid a company trademarking the name and the either forcing people to pay for the name, or disallowing them to use it, which they would be well within their rights to do. Imagine we were not allowed to _use_ the word Linux because someone completely outside the community owned the trademark! SLUG for one would become TUFKASLUG (The Usergroup Formerly Known As SLUG).
• Do I think it is wrong to charge to use the word Linux? Yes. Life is hard enough for Linux companies in Australia without extra costs and I am personally not interested in charging for the use of the Linux name by companies. If LA owns the trademark then the community has the ability to stop someone using the word inappropriately, such as calling a company “Linux World” when they only sell proprietary systems or not allowing others to use the word at all. Having said that I can understand the LMI needing to charge to sublicence the Linux trademark, as they need funds to survive and to protect the name if is challenged, and thus if anyone _wants_ to sublicence the name and pay for it, rock on, you are supporting another worthy Linux project, however if you don’t want to pay for it and are using it appropriately then I personally feel this should be ok.

The confusion seems to be that people think owning a trademark is synonymous with charging for the use of it. This is not true. Owning a trademark in our case is as a protective measure and to retain credibility for the word.

What a fantastic term! For Software Freedom Day the team in Perth have put together an awesome schedule including the chance for loads of projects to give a 10 minute demo, aka speedgeeking 🙂 Rocking idea Perth! Check out what all the Aussie SFD teams are doing, and even add your own team. I have an excess of SFD cd’s, stickers and other foo for any teams that haven’t got anything organised yet and want some help. Also check out the sfd online store for cheap tshirts and such for your team. I’m encouraging all Aussie teams to use the Linux Australia Grant Scheme to cover some costs and to help make their teams look sexy 🙂 Otherwise you could just do what Jeff and I did for the Education Expo in Sydney and wear something noticable with stickers 🙂

Rock on Australia!

Yesterday I went to my first Females in Information Technology and Telecommunications (FITT) meetings. It was pretty interesting and there was a talk from IDC on what keeps CIOs awake at night, as well as from HP on women in IT. I have to say I was disappointed with the latter, as she said that countries such as India with more women in IT probably only have the numbers as there are more call centres there (in her opinion, not HPs). I asked the questions about Malaysia, and how perhaps declining numbers of women in technical roles in Australia is more related to us getting more conservative rather than it being not interesting to girls as she implied. They were looking at ways to improve getting women into IT, (without looking at how to encourage young girls, for many women they already have grown up with a certain mindset about IT so it is too late) while simultaneously trying to downplay the “nerdiness” of technical jobs. I was I have to say a little insulted. Most women in this group are working in IT in PR, HR, or office admin roles and trying to get more women into IT without tackling the bigger problem of women being discouraged from a very early age in technical, scientific, political or even executive roles being. I think whilever these groups are trying to “encourage girls into non-traditional roles for women” as another similar group put it, they are projecting a message that simply is going to have an opposite effect. Keep calling it non-traditional and that it will stay. It was in short, a little disappointing to find yet again that women are often the biggest propogators of maintaining a less than desirable situation status quo for women.

On a lighter note, I’m very proud of Jeff for the recognition of his work in the community at OSCON. Rock on Bubby!

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.