So for this week only Hannover Fairs are offering 2 for the price of 1 tickets to the conference at CeBIT 2007, including Open CeBIT. This means tickets to Open CeBIT end up costing about $225 each, not bad for a great business focused Open Source conference. Check it out and call +61 2 9280 3400 to book.
links for 2007-03-27
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Open Source Initiative have updated their look. This is great and indicative that perhaps they are actually being active! Nicely done.
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“SOA taught Chuck Norris everything he knows.” — SOA facts. I’m currently sitting in a boring talk about SOA and Jeff just showed me this site. Hilarious!
links for 2007-03-26
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“Some frameworks have been developed to help those in IT procurement assess open source software.” — OSS-Watch. A useful set of criteria for assessing Open Source software in terms of procurement. Good work OSS-Watch!
Our community is open to everyone
There have been a few posts that have been reflected on the Australian planet sites recently that people might be offended about. I would just like to say that individual rants that are aggregated on the planets are not representative of everyone’s views. Our community is a diverse combination of cultures, religions, beliefs and more, all bound by an interest in software freedom and great technology. The diversity is what makes our community special, and we are stronger through it.
That is all.
Pia goes very Warhol
I think I’ve mentioned Elizabeth Gordon Werner before, the FOSS in Government advocate and aspiring artist. Well, she’s doing a series of FOSS art, and the latest looks and sounds a bit familiar 😉
Nicely done Elizabeth! There are more iterations of the same idea here.
Irish Linux User Group
While I was in Dublin, I also met up with the Irish Linux User Group, including Noirin (pronounced Noreen) and Stephen, who just got engaged. Congratulations guys! It was a fun night with some warm and fun people talking FOSS in a Dublin pub. Rock!
Ireland!
When I knew I was going to be in the UK for a couple of weeks, I decided if I could go over to Ireland for a weekend I’d try really hard to make it happen. Well, I’m here! Staying in a gorgeous place in Dublin along with my wonderful friend and fellow conspirator Maureen. She is great fun and yesterday we explored Dublin, while today we are going to an beautiful historical site called Glendalough.
I love Ireland! I definitely want to come back here for a month! Photos will come soon.
OLPC on Triple J’s Hack
Oxford LUG
Tonight I went along to OxLUG which was a small informal gathering at the pub. It was fun and there were some interesting people there. I chatted to them about LUG structure and events, and I believe they are going to start doing meetings with talks and such, so that could be pretty cool. Good luck with it OxLUG!
I’m going to go into London and hopefully meet up with some Lonix and GLLUG people this week.
Also, Phil Harper published some photos from the Software Freedom International group. Basically we only had 4 from the board meet up in meatspace to talk about the organisation direction and event logistics, however we had most of the other board members join us by IRC each day.
From the left and clockwise — Matt Oquist, Robert Schumann, Phil Harper and yours truly 🙂
Software Freedom at Oxford
I’m currently staying at Oxford (UK) working on some interesting projects. The last three days I’ve been meeting with most the Software Freedom International board, of which I’m president. We’ve been planning out Software Freedom Day 2007 and are aiming for the biggest global celebration of Software Freedom ever!
Software Freedom is an underpinning value of the FLOSS community, as well as others that value transparency, sustainability and the opportunity to participate in software and technology. The basic idea is that as more and more of our lives are based on technology (communication, history writing, culture creation, electronic elections, etc) it is imperative the technology we rely on is transparent (open, visible, able to be scrutinised) and sustainable (data must be accessible long term), otherwise how can we trust our basic human rights are being upheld in a world where technology underpins everything we do? How can we participate in the technology that shapes our future?
I wrote a short summary of this from the perspective of human rights and really believe that as more and more of the world becomes connected (particularly with the OLPC coming out) that bodies like the United Nations need to consider digital freedoms in their declaration of human rights, otherwise those basic human rights become compromised.
More on my other work here to come!