linux.conf.au 2013 News

Spotting team members in the wild

Submitted on 2013-01-18 17:24

We wanted it to be easy for delegates to find conference staff, especially because we are asking them to find us at public places like airports and bus stations. We've therefore come up with a very subtle uniform, which we hope will help us blend into the background. Here's Michael modelling it:

So remember, if in doubt look for the person whose shirt shouts.

Read this post on our blog.

Keynote Changes

Submitted on 2013-01-14 08:09

A change is as good as a holiday, right? Unfortunately, Sir Tim Berners-Lee's schedule has had a last minute change, so we've had to move his keynote to Friday instead of Thursday, and you'll get to see bunnie Huang on Thursday instead.

Everything else remains the same: this is still Sir Tim Berners-Lee's ONLY technical talk on this tour, it's still his first time in Australia in over a decade. It's just he'll now be doing his keynote on Friday morning, instead of Thursday.

Party on.

Read this post on our blog

Open Day Without Walls

Submitted on 2013-01-11 17:43

We had a great idea a while back. We were sitting around talking about our open day, and trying to work out our favourite bits about being a geek in Canberra. You see, we wanted to make sure that our open day was uniquely Canberra. We wanted you to walk away from the event thinking “so THAT’S what Canberra geeks are all about!”. OK, so that might sound a little creepy if you think about it too hard, but honestly we just wanted to showcase to you what we think are the best bits about our town. But then we realised that some our favourite bits involve things like the lake, and Make Hack Void our local hacker space. And it’s really hard to fit a lake into a room with tables and chairs. Have you seen Lake Burley-Griffin recently? Even if we could find a really big room, we wouldn’t be able to fit it in. And we’re not sure that the MHV people would let us have their 3D printer, either.

So we came up with a new solution. Instead of having you all sit in one place and be bored while we bring the best bits of Canberra to you, we will take you to the best bits of Canberra. We’ve lined up a few very special activities, which we will announce very soon, but we wanted to open the floor. If you’re a Canberra geek (or an ex-Canberra geek, or a semi-Canberra geek, or even a soon-to-be-Canberra geek), then hop along to our wiki page and let us know what unique aspect of Canberra geekery you can demonstrate to the collective wonderment of LCA2013 delegates. Think of it as an Open Day sans frontières: https://lca2013.linux.org.au/wiki/Open_Day

Read this post on our blog

Canberra Has Weather!

Submitted on 2013-01-11 17:40

It’s fairly traditional to have some kind of natural disaster in the weeks immediately preceding any linux.conf.au. We here at LCA2013 HQ didn’t want to let you down on this front, so we organised some record high temperatures and a whole bunch of bushfires. You can’t say that we don’t go above and beyond for you lot, seriously.

As we write this, it’s about 30°C (86°F), and we’re looking at staying in the 30′s for the next week or so. Note that this is unusually hot for us, but the wonderful people at the Bureau of Meteorology assure us that the heat wave will break sooner or later, and we’ll return to more normal temperatures before too long.

As for fires, things like this are notoriously difficult to predict, but so far there have been no bushfires threatening the capital. We will definitely let you know if that situation changes. Keep an eye on our social media feeds to make sure you don’t miss any announcements.

Starting from next week, we will start to share more information about the weather forecast for Canberra for the week of the conference. This is a probably a good time to remind you to make sure you bring a hat (if you haven’t ordered a conference hat, that is!), sunscreen, and a drink bottle with you. You will also want plenty of light clothing, with long sleeves to stop you getting burned. It might also be a good idea to bring extra clothing with you: in this weather it doesn’t take long to get hot and sweaty, so you might find yourself wanting to change more frequently.

Read this post on our blog

LCA2013 just sold out!

Submitted on 2013-01-10 14:20

One of the hard bits about running a conference like linux.conf.au is working out how many people will come. You need to make a guess about numbers for budgeting, but it's also important for the organiser’s mental and emotional health; no one wants to run a conference that no one comes to. The big problem with linux.conf.au specifically is that the data is dirty. It runs in a different city each year, at a slightly different time of year, with different economic conditions, which can all impact how many people might want to come.

The way we handled this for 2013 was we decided that we wanted to be a conference of 650 people, and everything was set up on that basis. We chose this number based on a whole bunch of different things, including what had happened at previous years, and a few good guesses about what would happen in Canberra. We wanted to pick a number that wasn't so low that we couldn't spend any money on anything, but were also very aware of the angst that selling out for linux.conf.au 2005 caused. So, we had a fallback plan.

This morning we sold out, which means we sold the 650 tickets we planned for. We’ve been aware that this was approaching for a few days now though, so we’ve gone back through the various inputs for the conference (swag, catering, venue size, and so on) and worked out that we can get another 50 people into the conference without too many problems.

So, we’ve added another fifty tickets. We’re pretty sure that these are the last tickets we can add, though. Not just because of the size of the venues, but also because we need to give final numbers to our various suppliers really soon now. We also need to make sure that we have enough swag and food and stuff for everybody. No one wants to be the person at lunch that misses out on a sandwich because we ran out.

If you want to come to linux.conf.au 2013 but haven’t registered or paid yet, you really have to do that now. If we keep up the sales rate from the last couple of weeks, these extra fifty tickets will only last a few days.

Read this post on our blog

Have you Paid for Your Rego Yet?

Submitted on 2013-01-03 16:30

It's a little over three weeks until the conference, and we have now sold well over 90% of the available tickets. Now is a really good time for you to check that your registration is all in order. Remember, registration is a three step process:

1. Create an account on the site.
2. Register to attend the conference.
3. Pay for your ticket.

If you haven't completed all three steps, then you will not have a badge ready for you when you arrive. And considering we're so close to selling out, we might not be able to accept your payment if it's late. You MUST pay for your ticket before we sell out, or you'll miss out.

We also want to remind you that we have tickets for the Open Government miniconf and the Sir Tim Berners-Lee keynote for sale here: http://lca2013.eventbrite.com.au/. This keynote is the only technical talk that Sir Tim Berners-Lee will be giving during his TBL Down Under tour, and it's a great opportunity for Canberra geeks to experience this once-in-a-lifetime event. This is a great opportunity to get your techy friends and family involved. Even if they wouldn't normally attend a conference like linux.conf.au, this keynote is set to be something truly special from a remarkable figure in internet and computing history.

Let the countdown to the party begin!

Read this post on our blog

Parking at LCA

Submitted on 2013-01-03 08:19

Are you thinking about bringing your car to LCA? If you are, you need to get a parking permit from us so that you can park at the ANU. The ONLY way to do this is to purchase parking through the registration process on the site. All the info you need is on the parking page.

Once you’ve purchased your parking permit, we will send you a form to fill out with your name and registration details. So that we can get all the info to the ANU in time for them to create the permits, we need to have you registered for a parking permit before MONDAY 7 JANUARY.

Remember: if you don’t have a parking permit you will not be able to park at ANU!

Parking is fairly inexpensive, but we would also like to remind you that we’re trying to be as green a conference as we possibly can. That means if you don’t have an electric or hybrid vehicle consider taking a bus, riding your bike, or walking. You can check out our transport page for more info.

See you at the party!

Edited to add: If you want to bring a motorcycle, scooter, or moped, you don’t need a parking permit, but you DO need to park it in designated motorcycle parking.

Read this post on our blog

Regional Delegates' Programme Announced!

Submitted on 2012-12-18 14:21

Good news from Linux Australia for regional delegates!

Linux Australia is restarting the Regional Delegates Program from previous years. These grants aim to reduce the financial barriers to attending linux.conf.au 2013, by subsidising the registration and travel costs of contributors to the FOSS community who are students, on a low income, and others who would otherwise have difficulty affording the cost of attending the conference. How do I apply? Our priority will be to maximise the number of attendees we can assist. Consideration will be given to grant requests from outside Australia and New Zealand; however, due to the larger costs, we would have to balance each such application against the number of local delegates we could otherwise support. Delegates who need to be accompanied by a guardian or caregiver (e.g, minors or persons with special needs) should include these details in their grant request. Minors should include contact details for their parent or guardian and have them sign the application. Your application should:

• Provide background information about your contribution to or involvement with the open source community
• Explain what you hope to learn from the conference.
• Show financial circumstances which would otherwise prevent you from attending the conference.
• Provide details of what assistance you would require in order to attend. This doesn't need to be a detailed list - "Flights to/from $HOMETOWN + accommodation" would be sufficient.
• Be in OpenDocument format, plain text, HTML or PDF.

Applicants will be selected on the following criteria:

• Participation in FOSS projects – art, hardware, software, documentation
• Reason for attending linux.conf.au
• Area of study
• Voluntary or paid work in IT
• Future plans/projects in mind
• Membership of FOSS related groups eg. a LUG, Linux Australia, LinuxChix, a Hackerspace, Wikipedia, OWOOT etc.

Email your application to RDP@lca2013.linux.org.au. Cheers, RDP team

Inventor of the Web to Keynote Linux Conference

Submitted on 2012-12-14 16:51

Australia's premier open source conference, linux.conf.au, are very proud to announce the fourth and final keynote speaker for 2013. Sir Tim Berners-Lee is best known for inventing the World Wide Web in the late 1980s, and is now the Director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which oversees web development around the world. Sir Tim Berners-Lee is appearing at linux.conf.au as part of his visit to Australia in January 2013, with support from a consortia of sponsors. The full details of the tour and sponsors are available at http://tbldownunder.org/

Sir Tim Berners-Lee was knighted in 2004 for his work on HTTP and the World Wide Web, and was elected as a foreign associate of the United States Academy of Sciences in 2009. He is also the 3Com Founders Professor of Engineering at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence (CSAIL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). This is Sir Tim Berners-Lee's first visit to Australia in over a decade, and his linux.conf.au keynote speech is set to be the only technical talk during his Down Under tour. This talk is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for Aussie geeks to see and hear the inventor of the web.

The keynote from Sir Tim Berners-Lee rounds out a full conference schedule, with other keynotes being given by fellow internet pioneer Radia Perlman, Chumby co-inventor Andrew 'bunnie' Huang, and Debian guru Bdale Garbee.

linux.conf.au attendees will have the opportunity to see Sir Tim Berners-Lee keynote on Thursday 31 January. There are still some conference tickets available from the conference website at http://linux.conf.au, but for those not attending the conference, keynote-only tickets and one day Open Government event tickets (including the keynote) are available for purchase from http://lca2013.eventbrite.com.au/

For more information on this jam-packed schedule, visit http://linux.conf.au/programme/schedule

About linux.conf.au

linux.conf.au showcases the best of open source and community-driven software and hardware, and it’s coming to the Australian National University from 28 January to 2 February, 2013. The conference provides a great opportunity for open source developers, users, hackers, and makers to share their ideas and further improve their projects.

Contact

Michael Still (Conference Director) +61 2 6140 4546 media@lca2013.linux.org.au

Childcare at LCA

Submitted on 2012-12-11 21:06

A long, long time ago, in a galaxy far … hold on. Let’s start that again. A long, long time ago, when the LCA 2013 team were first talking about putting a bid together (ah! We were so young and innocent then!), one of the big things we wanted to make sure we got right was making the conference accessible for parents and their children. We understand that not all parents have a partner who can (or want to!) take the kids on the partners’ programme, that sometimes both parents are interested in the conference, and that childcare for a week in January can often be difficult, expensive, or just impossible. Many of our core organisers have children, and it’s a problem we’ve all had to deal with in different ways at some stage.

With all that in mind, we’ve decided to continue what LCA Ballarat started, and provide a childcare room not too far away from the main conference venue where you can chill out with the kids, put them down for a nap, feed them, or give them a little time to play (and you a little time to sit down!). We’re taking it one step further, though, by also providing qualified and certified childcare workers to be in the room as well. Of course, you’re welcome to stay with your children for as long as you want to, but when you want to head out to that talk, you can do so safe in the knowledge that your children are in good hands.

We intend to stock the room with a whole bunch of fun things, including toys, video games, and DVDs. We also hope to be able to offer some bedding for naps (for the little people!), and some supervised outdoor play time.

For more information, and to get specific details about the childcare arrangement for the conference, you need to be on the parents mailing list. This is also the place where parents can discuss their arrangements, and make sure that the conference is going to be just as much of a party for their children as it is for the big people. Sign up here: http://lists.lca2013.linux.org.au/mailman/listinfo/parents_lists.lca2013.linux.org.au

Read this post on our blog

Next page