Yes as just an attendee rather than volunteer, I'd like to congratulate everyone on running a great day too. I had a lot of fun in the exhibition hall just chatting to people about good stuff like the open source 3D printer & Arduino - as someone who's been to a lot of software conferences & expos over the years I can say you guys definitely did a great job! Speaking of conferences - not sure if this list has had an announcement of the upcoming Open Source Developers Conference in Melbourne, 24-26 November, Abbotsford Convent http://2010.osdc.com.au/ (apologies if this is a duplicate). I went to this conference back in 2006 and it was a good one, and I believe they try to keep the attendance fees within reason. cheers, Patrick. On Tue, Sep 28, 2010 at 9:01 AM, Ben Sturmfels <ben@stumbles.id.au> wrote:
Hi Folks, Just wanted to say a big thanks on behalf of all of us to those who helped out with Software Freedom Day on the 18th.
I'd particularly like to thank Michael, Dave, Geoff, Alex and Daniel for attending to the Melb Free Software Interest Group table. They spoke to many people during the day, collect lots of registrations for this list and a heap of signatures against software patents.
Big thanks to Dave for organising CDs of the brand new Trisquel 4.0. It was fantastic to be able to hand out copies of a fully-free distribution. It was exciting to see a sharpened focus on free software and freedom this year. I suspect this was helped by the excellent timing of Stallman's speeches earlier that week.
On the other side of the library, the talks went very well. Attendance to my "Why is Free Software Important?" talk was bulked up by a strong attendance of my family members, who managed not to fall asleep. ;)
Unfortunately we weren't able to hear from Pia Waugh due to a delay in Senator Lundy's flight, but we did manage to fill some time showing the large crowd videos on free software, DRM and having a discussion about software patents. Senator Lundy walked in the door to applause and gave an excellent speech about how the government is planning to work better with it's citizens, making several references to "free software". The other talks by Rami Olwan (Creative Commons), Andrew Cunningham (Multilingual Web) and Paul Took (Red Hat) were very interesting too.
I haven't heard how the short talks went, but I have no doubt that they were great.
There are some great photos by Chris: http://www.flickr.com/photos/chrissamuel/sets/72157624855903041/
And by Jiri http://luv.asn.au/sfd2010/hires.html
Regards, Ben
_______________________________________________ Free-software-melb mailing list Free-software-melb@lists.softwarefreedom.com.au http://lists.softwarefreedom.com.au/mailman/listinfo/free-software-melb
-- Patrick Sunter VPAC Senior Computational Software Developer - AuScope Monash SAM Project Monash University Adjunct Research Associate (School of Mathematical Sciences) Room 301, Building 28 Monash University VIC 3800 Australia Ph: +61 (0)3 9905 4468 For VPAC/AuScope admin issues email: patrick@vpac.org For AuScope software development email: patdevelop@gmail.com