Linux Australia – President’s Report August 2010

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.

SFD2006 – Return to sender

Pia posting about Software freedom day, software freedom day online shop is up, reminded me about something I’ve been meaning to post for a while.

When you send in the address to get your team’s t-shirts and goodies, make sure you get it right!

Last year I helped pack all the goodies that we sent overseas, this was sometime in August if I remember correctly. We needed to put a return address on the packages so I offered the use of Bulletproof’s address.

6 months later the following turned up on our doorstep.





Notice the use of hemp rope and wax seal. This box has been through a lot!

Build your own ISP

I’ve finally gotten around to putting up the slides for my Build your own ISP talk I gave at Software Freedom Day and DEBSIG. You can find them on my Presentations page or a the direct link to the PDF here.

The slides are fairly sparse, the talk was a bit of a brain dump about random things to do with ISPs. I’m sure someone is going to ask me to give it at SLUG again at some stage 🙂

Software Freedom Day – AV and ISPs

This Saturday is Software Freedom Day, the main Sydney event sponsored by SLUG will be being held at UNSW, more specific details can be found at the Sydney SFD page.

As part of the lead up to linux.conf.au 2007, the AV Team is going to be using this day as a trial run to test out some of the technology we will probably be using at the conference, this currently includes

  • Flumotion for streaming of talks
  • Streaming from a scan converter for slides
  • Recording to DVDs using a consumer DVD recorder for post production and upload to the website
  • Standard recording to DV Tape as a backup 🙂

Apparently I will also be giving a workshop at 1pm, I say apparently because as usual we get to justblamepia.com. For the unwary, suggesting to Pia that you might be able to give a talk means that you will 🙂 The talk is currently titled How to build your own ISP – But why you shouldn’t, it will focus on the right way to set one up from scratch from my experiences at ZipWorld and Beagle Internet.