LCA 2010 Conference outstanding!

Several of us at Egressive went to two excellent, inspiring conferences in Wellington last week (18-24 January): Linux.conf.au 2010 and DrupalSouth 2010.

Linux.conf.au 2010

Linux.conf.au, a.k.a. LCA 2010, is the this years rendition of the world's third largest (and most purely technical) annual free and open source software conference and the largest - by far - in the southern hemisphere. It bounces around among cities in Australia - last year it was in Hobart, Tasmania - and this year, for the second time in its history, it left the continent for the shores of Aotearoa, gracing Wellington (in 2006 it took place in Dunedin).

The conference was attended by about 700 free and open source aficionados who took part in 2 days of "miniconfs" (5 topical streams of discussion each with a number of invited speakers and prepared talks in each) followed by 3 days of more formal technical talks in 6 streams. 

Tuesday through Thursday were started off with cracking good keynotes by three august members of the FOSS community: 

• Gabrielle Coleman from New York City, who spoke about her ethnographic research on the FOSS community, and the inspiration it gave her - she's working on a book titled "Coding Freedom: Hacker Pleasure and the Ethics of Free and Open Source Software".
• Benjamin Mako Hill from MIT (in Boston, USA), has had a profound effect on the FOSS hacker ethos as author of the Ubuntu Code of Conduct along with his technical contributions. He spoke on the dastardly world of "Antifeatures" - software capabilities, unique to proprietary, that work in the interest of the software's manufacturer and against the best interest of the software's user.
• Glyn Moody, author of Rebel Code spoke about the FOSS community's influential role in inspiring a new, open scientific community, and moves towards a more open society in general with trends like open government and open public data.

Each of talks was inspired and inspiring to those in attendance. The conference culminated in the Penguin Dinner on Friday night (for those that don't know, the penguin - endemic to NZ - is also the symbol of Linux) followed up on Saturday by the Open Day, filled with demonstrations - like electric cars - and sponsor stands and was open to the public.

Three of us from Egressive attended - Rob, Malc, and I (Dave) - and we loved it. We made lots of great new contacts, and renewed many from past years. Egressive is also very proud to have been a sponsor of the event, and would like to send many thanks to the tireless and remarkably good humoured conference coordinators, a.k.a. the Capital Cabal - all volunteers - who did an incredible job, running the whole proceedings flawlessly (despite stomach bugs and imminent birthings!).