linux.conf.au: Taking FOSS to the masses

By Sam Varghese
Monday, 24 December 2007 19:01

Opinion and Analysis

Jacinta Richardson is one woman who admits to definitely being a geek. But that hasn't got in the way of her being the organiser of the only non-geek event of the 2008 Australian national Linux conference - Open Day.
Asked how she came to be involved, she says that chief organiser Donna Benjamin "asked me really nicely." Jacinta has been involved in other conferences, notably the Open Source Developers' Conference which is held in Queensland each year. She helped organise it for the first three years of its existence.

A Perl trainer and consultant, Jacinta is one-half of the company Perl Training Australia. Born in Alice Springs, she moved to Bendigo when she was 10 and later to Melbourne.

Her first exposure to the Linux conference was in Sydney in 2007. She ventured thither after having been involved in a number of Linux user groups, or LUGs, mostly doing advocacy. "If I care about something, I want to make it happen in the right way," she explains when asked why she is interested in FOSS - which she obviously sees as the right kind of software.

Open Day is focused on non-programmers. Jacinta says it's a way to expand the conference to the general public. Five days of talks and meetings for geeks precede Open Day - despite all the commercialisation associated with Linux these days, the Australian conference has retained its technical roots. Sponsors have realised that this is what makes it a success and have, wisely, not tried to change things in any way.

The money for organising Open Day comes out of the conference budget. Community projects get free stands to show off their wares. Conference sponsors get stands if they so wish but the emphasis is not so much on the commercial as the social.

Among the stands this year will be one devoted to MythTV (software that allows one to create a personal video recorder on a Linux box), Computerbank (which installs Linux on recycled PCs and sends them to countries like East Timor), ASUS (which will be showing off their EePC, a little notebook that runs Xandros), and OpenMoko (an integrated open source mobile communications platform).

A Linux gaming stand, which will be run by Tim "Mithro" Ansell, is expected to be one of the main pulling points of Open Day. Ansell is also organising the Gaming MiniConf.