LCA 2011: The quiet man at the helm

Sam Varghese
Monday, 29 November 2010 12:18

Opinion and Analysis

The man behind the next Australian national Linux conference is an academic, a retiring type not exactly prone to bluff and bluster. He and his team are quietly getting things ready for the last week of January 2011 when a host of geeks will converge on Brisbane for the 12th LCA, the second to be held in the city since the conference was first held in 1999.

Dr Shaun Nykvist, a senior lecturer at the school of mathematics, science and technology education at the Queensland University of Technology, says the idea of hosting the LCA in Brisbane again - the conference was organised there in 2002 - was something he had joked about with his friends for some time.

"I was chatting to a few friends and had always joked about stepping up and getting LCA back to Brisbane (as) I had quite a bit of experience with other conferences," Nykvist told iTWire in an interview.

"About a week later, one of the members from the local Linux user group, HUMBUG, suggested that I put my name forward to run with the bid and lead the team and after a little voting I found myself leading the team. This is where it all started and I really wasn't holding my hopes too high until a couple of days before Christmas in 2009 when the Linux Australia team said we had been successful in our bid. It's just been full steam ahead ever since then."

Nykvist is somewhat different compared to the organisers of previous years. "I spent most of my early career in outback and indigenous communities and in the last eight to 10 years I have developed, managed and led a number of large international projects and activities (some of these being large multi-million dollar projects with a very diverse team)," he says.

"The international work has been mainly focused on assisting developing countries (e.g. Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand) and working with minority groups and indigenous people (more recently the indigenous Sami people of Lap Lap land)."

He says that having a background in both education and IT has been beneficial, "as I can make informed decisions about what is really needed in these communities in terms of IT and related development work or project scoping. I often find that these communities become quite interested in the projects and soon take ownership of them.

"A lot of the community type work I have been involved in stems from a capacity building model - I find that this is most beneficial to all involved. There is often very little funding in some of these communities and therefore I tend to work with the tools available to me - I suppose this is where I have seen the real strength and value of free and open source software. The international collaboration has definitely broadened my horizons and given me a completely different outlook on life and how I now think about things."