Thursday 31st January
Thursday's keynote was by Stormy Peters on "Would you do it again for free?". She referenced various studies which showed that if you took someone who was doing something they loved, and paid them to keep doing it, that once the payments stopped, they'd be less inclined to continue. There was also some talk about how hiring an open source developer to continue to keep working on their open source - but then requiring that they "work as an employee" - can lead to frustration and disinterest in the project itself. Stormy suggests that some of the bigger businesses seem to have realised this and are improving matters. The end conclusion seems to be that those paid to work on open source, will continue to work on open source even without the pay... but it'll probably be for a different project.
The conference highlight of the day was being awarded a HP iPac. TA few intended recipients weren't available to take their prizes, so Donna Benjamin (head conference organiser) called out some dates, and those with birthday's on those dates won the prize. The final date was "who's birthday is closest to today" and about 6 people (including me) put up their hands. So she clarified and asked if anyone's birthday is today, and that just left me. What a lovely 30th birthday gift!
The "Clustered Samba" talk by Andrew Tridgell (Tridge) was quite good, and I left feeling like I understood almost everything even though I've never set up a samba server, or a clustered anything. I then walked over to probably the most loved regular conference talk "Rockhopper Robot: Designing and Programming an Autonomous Robot with Linux and Open Source" by Doug Chapman. This showed a small autonomous robot navigating around a simple maze and blowing out candles where it saw them. It was simply awesome! This meant I missed Allison Randal's talk :(, but I hope to be able to download and catch up on that soon.
Both Glenn Wightwick's talk on Linux and Home Automation and Elizabeth Garbee's talk on An Introduction to Open Source Animation also deserve a mention.
The end of the day was celebrated with both the Professional Delegates' Networking Session (PDNS) to which all delegates who paid "professional" rates, all speakers, and all exec are invited; and the Google Student Party who invited everyone else. I skipped out on both of these and had a lovely birthday dinner with my friends and family.
Friday 1st February
Happy mail-man day! I took the first part of this morning off from the conference, and thus did not get to see Anthony Baxter's keynote. I hear it was well appreciated however. I arrived in time for morning tea but was quickly mobbed by people asking about Open Day requirements, so I didn't get to eat anything.
I won free for long enough to see (most of) Kimberlee Weatherall's talk on "Stop in the Name of the Law" which was interesting, but hard to apply to what I'm doing.
Upon leaving the lecture theatre I was mobbed again until I ran off to find food and somewhere quiet to eat it.
Carefully sneaking into the lecture theatres allowed me to see Tamara Olliver's talk on "Create Your Own Open Source Dance Mat" and Jeff and Pia Waugh's talk on "The Australian Open Source Industry and Community Census 2007". These were both really interesting, although it was disappointing to see Perl so far down on the list of languages used by software developers. First was C, then C++, Python and PHP were all equal, then Java a little below them and only then Perl with significantly less people using it. Ruby trailed the pack even further.
The rest of the afternoon was spent arranging tables and room space for Open Day. I missed all the lightning talks, which is disappointing, but saw some bits of the closing ceremony. At one point (after being sent off to fetch something from HQ) I walked up to the door (at the back of the room), only to have Donna (speaking) notice me, realise that I wasn't listed on her slide of thankyous (that was on display) and thus thank me personally, which was sweet.
Friday evening was followed by the Google Party. This was a very responsible party, with a few security guards, lots of bbqed food (although not a lot of choices), lots of salad (2 choices), and plastic cups of wine, beer, orange juice, cola (sugared and diet) and lemonade. To get drinks you had to have either a blue (non-alcoholic only) or orange wrist band. Those giving out bands showed varying degrees of diligence in checking ID, but I think that orange wrist bands only went out to those over 18.
All drinks (including water) evaporated at 8:30pm which was unexpected and lead to a rapid wind-down of the evening. Some people went onwards to local pubs while others retired early. Overall, I felt the food, lighting, music and socialising was better this year than last; but the drinks and venue (more seats!) was better last year.
Open Day
Somehow I foolishly ended up starting Open Day at 8am. I was late, but the only person I seemed to inconvenience was the Micro-hire delivery person who I hadn't been expecting until 10am anyway. Other helpers showed up soon after and moved tables, added table cloths, put up posters and banners, ran cables, found power points etc Set-up went extraordinarily well, all things considered, and we were almost ready for our first guests who arrived at about 11:30pm.
The Linux Australia AGM ran long past 12pm (which was my anticipated end time for it) so lunch was somewhat delayed, but most people seemed fairly happy all the same. While the hot food ran out pretty quickly there were enough sandwiches for me to carry around a tray to all the table organisers a short while later.
I had 325 pairs of CDs to give out, and ran out by about 1:30pm. Since most visitors to my "rego" booth were in pairs or families, this suggests that I had about 650 people. There were also many who didn't come near my table too. Since the day seemed to only get busier I think it's safe to say that we topped 1000 visitors!
Paul Fenwick and Adam Harvey took care of the main talks and lightning talks throughout the afternoon, which made my life much easier. The talks appeared to be well attended so I hope the visitors got something out of them as well. Paul suggests that there were generally about 200 people in the Grand Buffet (where the talks were held) at any given time.
Clean-up ended up being remarkably swift with lots of helping hands. All the hardware seemed to find appropriate homes, and only a few items ended up in "lost and found". We generally got all the tables back to where they should have been and picked up most of our junk from the floor, so I hope that the facilities providers will welcome us back again.
After dropping the RepRap device back at the Olliver's hotel, Paul and I did a delivery run back to linux.conf.au's storage room and then headed home. After a great take-out dinner, and hot shower, Paul gave me a foot massage and I finally got an early night.
