It’s been just over a month since my last presidents report, which according to past presidents means that I’m doing well. Apparently the first report is the easy one, maintaining momentum is the key!
LCA2011
We are now well and truly into the run up to linux,conf.au 2011. The LCA Call for Papers, Miniconfs, Posters and Tutorials (that is quite a mouthful!), has been open since the 13th of July. The CFP closes at midnight tonight, so it’s still not too late to get a proposal in.
Everyone should spend the next 5 minutes thinking of the one person or topic they would love to be able to listen to at LCA next year. Now, go and email that person and convince them to submit something. But hurry, you don’t have long.
The Paper Review Committee will be performing an online review of all the papers over the next 2 weeks. They will then meet in Sydney for a final one day review to decide what makes it into the conference. I’ve been involved in the process for the last few years, and I can tell you that it is not an easy process. The quality of the submissions we receive for LCA each year is extremely high and it is a very difficult task to whittle down 200-300 submissions into the 90 or so proposals we have space for.
LCA2012 Bid process
Submissions for LCA2012 close on the 15th of August, which is tomorrow night! So far we have had an expression of interest from Ballarat, and the odd rumour that other cities also have some teams thinking about it.
Once the bids come in, the council will take time to review them, and then we will begin visiting each team so that they can pitch their bid to us in person why they should earn the honour of hosting the next LCA.
This year we have changed the process slightly and asked all the teams to post their submission publicly. I’m looking forward to reading the proposals and having a healthy community discussion about which city should host LCA.
Software Freedom Day
Software Freedom Day is just around the corner, being held on the 18th of September. SFD is a worldwide celebration of FOSS and also serves to educate the general public about the benefits of FOSS.
According to the SFD website, it looks like we have about 6 teams registered in Australia. Noticeably missing are most of our capital cities. Please bring up SFD at your next LUG meeting or on your LUGs mailing list and try to organise an event in your area.
This year Linux Australia will be assisting SFD teams by providing schwag from past LCAs to give away at events. You should see an email to the list with more details about this shortly.
Also don’t forget that when you register your team on the official SFD website, Software Freedom International will send out SFD schwag for you to use on the day.
Australian Treasury Department, SBR and Auskey (Update)
As I mentioned last month, I’ve been doing some work in my capacity as President as well as my day job in regards to creating an Open Source project around the Australian Treasury’s Standard Business Reporting (SBR) project.
We recently held a meeting with some representatives from the Department of Treasury, where we were able to discuss our plans and what is required to make SBR and Auskey available for the Open Source community. SBR have shown a keen interest in the project and have been quite helpful in making resources and people available to help us with the project.
SBR have also recently announced that they will be supporting Linux on the AusKey website. This has not been possible up till this point as a browser plug-in is required to be able to interact with Auskey. SBR hopes to have a solution released by the end of the year and will be initially supporting Ubuntu. This means that Australian businesses using Open Source Software will soon be able to submit their BASs online again.