linux.conf.au 2013 News

LCA2013 Sysadmin and Arduino Miniconfs Announced

Submitted on 2012-09-04 12:41

linux.conf.au, Australia’s premier open source conference, have announced the third set of miniconferences for 2013, addressing open source system administration, and open hardware. Miniconfs are day-long sessions on a specific topic. As the name suggests, they are expected to be run as a miniature conference, with a formal schedule published ahead of time listing speakers and sessions for the day.

Computing systems everywhere are installed, maintained, and updated by a veritable army of systems administrators. Often overlooked by the more visible professions within the IT industry, systems administrators are nevertheless crucial to successful operations across the world.

Systems Administration: This miniconference covers tips, tricks, tools, and best practices to manage both big and small real-world Linux environments. Talks at this conference will be directly useful to professional Linux systems administrators.

Advances in Linux Security: Security is increasingly important in the mobile and embedded markets. This miniconference will focus on new developments and the systems that rely on them, with discussions on Android, Chromium, and Tizen. There will also be updates on existing security modules and distributions.

The conference organisers are also pleased to announce the return of a very popular open hardware miniconference:

Arduino: Interest in open hardware is high among linux.conf.au delegates but there is also a barrier to entry with the perceived difficulty and dangers of dealing with hot soldering irons, unknown components and unfamiliar jargon. This miniconference will combine hardware, firmware and the physical world in a specially designed project that the attendees build themselves. In the afternoon, presentations will cover the spectrum of open-hardware activity.

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. Early bird registrations open 1 October, see linux.conf.au for all the info.

LCA2013 Open Community Miniconfs Announced

Submitted on 2012-08-28 12:46

linux.conf.au, Australia’s premier open source conference, have announced the second set of miniconferences for 2013, all of which look at the open source community. Miniconfs are day-long sessions on a specific topic. As the name suggests, they are expected to be run as a miniature conference, with a formal schedule published ahead of time listing speakers and sessions for the day.

Community is one of the most important and noticeable aspects of open source development. Without the open source community, there is no open source. At linux.conf.au, the community miniconfs are aimed at bringing like-minded people together to discuss the things they’re passionate about.

Open Government: This miniconference explores how open standards, open data and open source can be used to achieve more transparent and engaging government, and how open technologies more broadly help achieve a more efficient, effective and citizen-centric approach to service and information delivery.

Multimedia and Music: The digital convergence of media has seen increasing use of computer-based platforms for the consumption of all forms of media. The Multimedia and Music miniconference will discuss all aspects of production and playback of music, audio, and video on open source platforms.

Haecksen: This miniconference is designed to encompass the wide range of activities that women are involved in throughout open source, and has historically attracted women involved in areas as diverse as software development, hardware hacking, and smart crafting, along with a wide array of other disciplines within free and open source software.

Linux Distributions: The wide range of open source distributions can lead to a minefield of contributors agreements, licensing, tools, communications, governance, version control systems, bug reporting, funding, and marketing. This miniconference is intended to help forge a path through the confusion and share best practices from existing lead distributions.

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. Early bird registrations open 1 October, see linux.conf.au for all the info.

LCA2013 Cloud Computing Miniconfs Announced

Submitted on 2012-08-21 09:57

linux.conf.au, Australia's premier open source conference, have announced the first three miniconferences for 2013, all of which address different angles of cloud computing. Miniconfs are day-long sessions on a specific topic. As the name suggests, they are expected to be run as a miniature conference, with a formal schedule published ahead of time listing speakers and sessions for the day.

Open source is at the core of cloud computing across the world. In 2011, the Cloud Computing Outlook survey* reported that a whopping 97% of respondents used some form of open source technology in their cloud implementations.

Cloud Infrastructure, Distributed Storage and High Availability: This miniconference discusses how to build reliable infrastructure, from bare metal deployment of cloud compute and storage systems, to applications built on top of IaaS offerings. This is a core business to operations engineers across the world, and an important aspect of cloud computing.

OpenStack: The OpenStack project was started by NASA and Rackspace, and is now supported by a large number of companies including Red Hat, Canonical, Suse, Hewlett Packard, AT&T, Cisco, Dell, and Yahoo! The OpenStack miniconference will cover recent developments in the project, and provides a chance to explore deployment strategies.

MobileFOSS: Mobile computing has come a long way in the past couple of years. Thanks largely to open source, mobile smartphones and tablet computers are well within the reach of ordinary consumers. This miniconference discusses the mobile landscape, and how the open source community can grow with it.

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. Early bird registrations open 1 October, see http://linux.conf.au for all the info.

* The 2011 Cloud Computing Outlook Survey was conducted by BitNami, Cloud.com and Zenoss, and can be read here: http://www.cloudstack.org/cloud-computing-docs/cloud-computing-survey.pdf

So Close!

Submitted on 2012-07-23 12:18

Evil Steve fell asleep at his keyboard on Friday night, and a few extra proposals slipped in under the wire. In the end, we were just ONE PROPOSAL SHORT of hitting our goal which made us all pretty excited. So excited that we made a graph!

That green line is the number of proposals we got for LCA 2013. See the sharp rise at the end? That’s the bit where you all busted everything you have sending us what you’ve got. You are all amazing. Yes, even you!

Mikal has been sneaking peeks at the submissions you sent us, and got so excited that we had to send him off to the doctor to get his heart checked. He’ll be okay, they reckon, but we need to keep him quiet for a while. So we set him the most boring task we could think of: testing and tagging all the powerboards we’ll need in January:

We figure that’ll keep him busy for a while.

Right now, Mary and Michael are doing some warmups before diving into the proposal review. We had the idea that you might like to know exactly how that works, so this is what the next few months are going to look like here at LCA2013 HQ:

• First off, the review team will spend four weeks frantically reading your proposals and trying to work out how to rank them. This is a pretty difficult process so it takes quite a while.

• The review process ends with a face to face meeting where we work out which proposals to accept, what streams we should create, and how we should spend the travel budget for those that requested funding. It’s pretty complicated and takes a whole heap of brain power to work out how to build the best possible content AND stay within budget. We’ll probably have pizza for lunch to cheer ourselves up.

• Around the end of August the review team hands their recommendations over to the conference organisers. We then attempt to schedule the streams in rooms, and work out how to arrange things to tell the story we want for the conference. We’re not having themed days or anything like that, but we do want to get you all thinking about things you might not have considered before.

• After all that, we start sending out acceptance emails in early September, and wait for speakers to accept their slot and let us know that they’ll definitely be able to make it. The big deadline for us here is making sure we have a draft schedule online for when we open early bird regos at the start of October.

“BUT WAIT!” we hear you say, “What about the golden ticket?!”. Never fear, there will be a golden ticket announcement in September, once we’ve worked out which proposals have been accepted. We’ll also post a photo of Mikal in a silly hat. AND THAT’S A PROMISE!

So, thank you all for the massive effort in getting your proposals in. Having so many proposals means we are going to be able to pick out the absolute best ones for you in January. This is going to be one helluva party!

Read this post on our blog

Record Beating, and Golden Tickets

Submitted on 2012-07-21 17:05

Last night we were sitting around LCA2013 HQ with our socks off, using all our fingers and toes to count the proposal submissions we’d received, and we realised something: we’re REALLY CLOSE to getting the most proposals received for an LCA ever. And we said to ourselves: Hey! Selves! Wouldn’t it be awesome if we can beat the record that those conference organisers over the ditch set in 2010!

And then, because fantastic ideas tend to come in waves, we thought we would make the whole thing EVEN MORE exciting by offering someone a golden ticket. And while we realise that it would be cheaper for us to give away a ticket to someone who has had a talk accepted, we also realise that that’s not much of a great deal for you.

So, here’s how it works: You submit as many talks as you possibly can, to help us beat the record number of submissions. We put the names of the submitters into a large silly hat here at LCA2013 HQ, and make Mikal draw names out one by one, until he pulls out the name of someone who HASN’T had a proposal accepted. We send that lucky person a free professional ticket to the conference. Then we make Mikal wear the silly hat in public.

Yeah, we were pretty proud of that plan too.

So, get your submissions in TODAY because Evil Steve will be sitting up late tonight so that he can close the CFP at midnight sharp (that’s 1400 on Friday 20 July UTC, if the timezone thing is doing your head in). Head over to http://linux.conf.au/cfp for all the details, get your submission in so that you have a chance for the ticket, and give us a chance to thumb our nose at the kiwis!

See this post on our blog

Sponsor Prospectus Now Available

Submitted on 2012-06-27 13:19

linux.conf.au 2013 is shaping up to be a huge event, and the team has now released their prospectus for potential sponsors. Scheduled to be held at the Australian National University from 28 January to 2 February, 2013, the conference is designed to showcase the best of open source and community-driven software and hardware. It provides a great opportunity for open source developers, users, hackers, and makers to share their ideas and further improve their projects.

This is a great opportunity to get in early and take advantage of the sponsorship deals being offered for the conference. The conference routinely hosts 500-700 delegates in a different city each year. Canberra last hosted the event in 2005 for 550 delegates, and this year organisers are expecting it to be even bigger.

Michael Still, conference director, said “this year we are planning some really exciting social events and some fascinating keynotes, with an emphasis on future sustainable technological development. The Call for Presentations opened three weeks ago, and already we are seeing some excellent proposals from a wide range of speakers”.

To receive a copy of the sponsorship prospectus, email sponsorship@lca2013.linux.org.au

Get in early, as sponsor places are bound to fill up fast!

linux.conf.au 2013 call for proposals extended

Submitted on 2012-07-06 23:41

PRESS RELEASE

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Got Something to Say? There’s Still Time!

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.

The call for proposals has now been open for four weeks, and the quality of submissions so far has been outstanding. Originally scheduled to be closed this week, the papers committee has agreed to extend the deadline by two weeks, just to give everyone a chance to have their voice heard.

This year, linux.conf.au is focusing on deep technical content, and the things that you think are going to really matter in the future. Successful proposals will be announced in August, 2012.

Mary Gardiner and Michael Davies, papers committee chairs, are excited about the submissions they have seen so far, and they want to ensure that everyone has had a chance to submit a proposal about something they feel passionate about. "We are expecting a broad range of technical talks on all sorts of new and interesting technologies", Michael said.

If you have been working on something interesting, now is the time to tell the world! Visit linux.conf.au/cfp, and submit your proposal today.

About linux.conf.au

linux.conf.au is one of the largest open source conferences in the southern hemisphere, and will be held in Canberra at the Australian National University from 28 January to 2 February, 2013.

Contact:

Michael Still (Conference Director)

+61 2 6140 4546

media@lca2013.linux.org.au

Got Something to Say About Open Source?

Submitted on 2012-06-03 21:17

linux.conf.au is shaping up to be a huge event, and they want your input! Scheduled to be held at the Australian National University from 28 January to 2 February, 2013, the conference is designed to showcase the best of open source and community-driven software and hardware. It provides a great opportunity for open source developers, users, hackers, and makers to share their ideas and further improve their projects.

The conference is now asking interested people and groups to submit proposals for talks. This year, they are focusing on deep technical content, and the things that you think are going to really matter in the future. Do you have something to say about freedom and privacy, open source cloud systems, or energy efficient server farms of the future? Or something else that you are passionate about?

Michael Still, conference director, is excited about the potential for some truly fascinating talks from a wide range of speakers, saying “to a large extent, the conference is what the speakers make it”.

All proposals will be submitted to the papers committee, this year headed by Michael Davies, past conference director, and Mary Gardiner, co-founder of the Ada Initiative. Successful proposals will be announced in August, 2012.

If you have been working on something interesting, now is the time to tell the world! Visit linux.conf.au, and submit your proposal today.

About linux.conf.au

linux.conf.au is the largest Linux conference in the southern hemisphere, and will be held in Canberra at the Australian National University from 28 January to 2 February, 2013.

Contact

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

Got Something to Say About Open Source?

Submitted on 2012-06-06 17:25

linux.conf.au is shaping up to be a huge event, and they want your input! Scheduled to be held at the Australian National University from 28 January to 2 February, 2013, the conference is designed to showcase the best of open source and community-driven software and hardware. It provides a great opportunity for open source developers, users, hackers, and makers to share their ideas and further improve their projects.

The conference is now asking interested people and groups to submit proposals for talks. This year, they are focusing on deep technical content, and the things that you think are going to really matter in the future. Do you have something to say about freedom and privacy, open source cloud systems, or energy efficient server farms of the future? Or something else that you are passionate about?

Michael Still, conference director, is excited about the potential for some truly fascinating talks from a wide range of speakers, saying “to a large extent, the conference is what the speakers make it”.

All proposals will be submitted to the papers committee, this year headed by Michael Davies, past conference director, and Mary Gardiner, co-founder of the Ada Initiative. Successful proposals will be announced in August, 2012.

If you have been working on something interesting, now is the time to tell the world! Visit linux.conf.au, and submit your proposal today.

About linux.conf.au

linux.conf.au is the largest open source conference in the southern hemisphere, and will be held in Canberra at the Australian National University from 28 January to 2 February, 2013.

Contact

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

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