Pia Waugh – “most awesome talk”

I’ve been speaking about FOSS at a lot of non-FOSS conferences recently, including the Go Girls event in Perth, a few school events, some NGO conferences and to some Universities around NSW. I’ll also soon be speaking at another couple of events aimed at school kids, Software Freedom Day in Sydney and strangely enough at a “telecentre” conference. Apparently a conference about the deployment of telecentres around Australia, a great place to talk about FOSS for sustainable networks 🙂

Anyway, I was very pleased to find out that my talk was rated the “most awesome” at the 2006 Go Girls event, as judged by about 2300 school girls. Rock on! Perhaps we’ll have a few more young people getting into FOSS from Perth 🙂

If every person in the Australian community did just one outreach project a year, even if it was just installing OpenOffice for someone, then imagine where we can be just a few years from now. In Australia, I estimate we have around 5000 people in our FOSS community (LUGs, developers, sysadmins, advocates, etc). 5000 people influencing 5000 people who in turn talk to their friends about it…. We could probably reach most of Australia in about 5 years if we tried 🙂

Women need “simple pleasures”

Mr Laurie said rural women, like their urban counterparts, needed simple pleasures such as going out for coffee and playing tennis together.

Wow, now I know what I’m missing in my life. Obviously not enough coffee and tennis time with the girls! Tee hee hee!

Comment made by the President of the NSW Farmers Association. Thanks Tongmaster for pointing this out. I love it when people demostrate their biases through what they probably think is a perfectly reasonable comment 🙂

25km rides, at night, no lights :)

Last week I did my first long bicycle ride, I rode home from Macquarie Uni the long way. I did however forget about the whole dusk thing, and as I don’t have lights on my bicycle yet, I ended up riding the long but safer way and the whole way on the footpath 🙂

Ah well, I’m enjoying this bike business anyway, it is awesome fun and I’m getting fit!

We ended up buying some nice Apollo bikes from a great place in West Ryde.

Open Source Legal and Research Seminar

For all those interested in research and legal matters, the ASK-OSS project I’m working on is holding a great event including Mark Webbink (Red Hat Deputy General Counsel), Dan Ravicher (Legal Director at the Software Freedom Law Centre), Rob Pike (Google), Gernot Heiser (NICTA Program Leader) and Carl Middlehurst (NICTA General Counsel). It should be an awesome event, so check it out and click thought to the NICTA page for registrations. August 15th In Sydney, and a related event happening 17th August in Brisbane. Both linked from the ASK-OSS page.

Software Freedom Day 2006!

This year I am on the board of Software Freedom International, the group that run Software Freedom Day. There is some awesome stuff happening this year, with a competition that includes the folk from LUG Radio, and some FOSS stars. Everyone has a chance to win both signed tshirts and tasty hardware. The competition includes both individual and team prizes. Here is an excellent mockup of a logo done for Australia 🙂

I’ve also written up a short “Why Software Freedom Matters” on the Software Freedom Day site which also mentions that there is only one week left to register your teams!

Mockup Australian SFD Logo

So the idea is that we are going to be keeping the official SFD logo from 2005 which is basically a sun coming over the mountains with a beautiful sky. Then teams around the world can build their own SFD based on the theme! I mentioned in passing that it would be cool to do an Australia SFD logo using Uluru and, as is often the case in the FOSS world, Phil Harper sent me a picture within a few days of his impression of my idea.

International Fair Use Day

Today (July 10th) is International Fair Use Day, and although we don’t have any legal concept of ‘Fair use’ in Australia, it really highlights that we are taking on all the issues of the US DMCA (in our US/AU FTA) without the partial balancing effect that fair use gives consumers in the US. i.e. – all the issues and none of the protections 🙁

Check out this very amusing cartoon that shows the ridiculousness of some of the arguments we are hearing about increasing digital protections, and reducing consumer rights.

That’s what file sharing is like: Taking a kitty away from a kitty…

Files are not for sharing

DMCA checklist – all the things you can’t do anymore!

Janet Hawtin, one of the Linux Australia has put together an awesome document which poses questions and answers how the DMCA makes those actions unclear. Examples are being able to read your e-book aloud to your child, being able to install new hardware to your computer, and all kinds of scenarios that make is really obvious in a non-technical fashion why the DMCA style laws being enacted in the Australian/US FTA are so bad for us as a community.

Rock on Janet! Janet also did the Software Freedom Day posters and stuff last year which are all on her website so check them out too 🙂

Linux chicks coffee ‘n’ cake before SLUG

I realised I hadn’t blogged about this yet, and it is one of the highlights of my month! At CeBIT I finally met up with Sara Falamaki who I’d spoke to before but not met, and Myrto Zehnder who works with Gernot at NICTA. The three of us joined about 20 other people who went for beers after CeBIT and we commented that it was lovely to meet other technical women and we should do it regularly. Unfortunately many of the “women IT” groups in Australia are run by PR, HR and small business owner women, and thus being a technical female there you feel quite left out and thus don’t return. Anyway, so last month we got the word out to some people we knew and had about a dozen women come along for “coffee n cake” 🙂 Just a fun, informal and social event to catch up with some other cool technical women and it was fun to find other technical women in Sydney doing cool things. I can only liken it to being the only kid into Metallica at school and then attending a Metallica concert. It was great! All of those ladies then came along to SLUG and enjoyed it, and so I think it was a big success!

So we are doing it again this month, and have a website with all the details. It is of course mentioned on the SLUG events and mailing list, and if anyone knows technical chicks who are into FOSS, let them know about it! 🙂