Leah has a central role in the decision-making that goes on as the conference takes shape but there is no great bureaucracy involved. "Our team structure is very flat, so I'm really not responsible for any one group of people," she says.

"I deal with almost everyone on the team as our areas of responsibility overlap, and take guidance and opinions from everyone involved to help bolster the decision-making process."

Her career direction - she is now a computer services officer at TAFE Tasmania - was not in any way influenced by her family background. Her parents, she says, are into computers only so far as productivity is concerned.

"However, my mother did learn how to tinker with the BIOS a few years back to fix her printer, after a quick run through over the phone. I was very impressed when she rang back to tell me she'd made this change and that change and now it was working," she says.

Her father is in the process of learning how to write complex spreadsheet formulae to create scoring tables for his local golf club.

But Leah herself has a much deeper interest in technology. "My first introduction to computers was the little handheld computer games you used to get with the fixed LCD displays - it fascinated me that you could create something that would entertain for hours with only a couple of dozen fixed shapes flashing on and off," she recalls.

"I remember as a very young child trying to recreate these with pen and paper and realising that there was an element to a computer system that just couldn't be created by yourself - like playing chess against yourself, you need to have that element of unpredictability to create a game."

The geek in her was evident early on. "Computers were something I hadn't really seen much of until the Commodore 64 became mainstream. I used to spend shopping night in front of the Commodore 64 stand at my local shopping centre, trying to work out for myself what BASIC commands I could type in to make it do things... so I suppose my first program really was entirely self taught!"

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