[Osia-discuss] Re: [Linux-aus] MEDIA RELEASE: Open Source Industry Australia - National Body Launched

[Pia Smith]

Hi Dell,

On Mon, 2004-03-01 at 20:58, Del wrote:
> Are there any plans to associate / form a working agreement / affiliate
> the organisations in any way?  Although I see LA as for the users and
> the LUGs for the LUs, and linux.conf.au for the linux.conf'ers, it'd
> be good to have some kind of working agreement covering things like
> media relations, trade show relations, etc.

Funny you should ask, as some of this was covered in the recent Linux
Australia meeting (Saturday). Linux Australia will be setting up a Press
group, which will consist of several media savvy peoples, Michael Davies
(ctte) as liason officer, and myself as press officer. We will be
attempting to train up relevant people in this group, and also in the
comunity who speak to the media in order to be more effective. The group
will be involved in reactive and proactive media strategies. We are
certainly looking forward to working _with_ OSIA in order to bring both
sides of the coin to the light.

In terms of trade shows and stuff, it would certainly be interesting to
run something in Australia soon as there is such a high demand and
interest. I know several people have floated the idea of a roadshow, and
it is being researched.

> The topic of installfests and/or commercial Linux trade shows has been
> bantered about the community again (I just posted to the SLUG activities
> list on it).  Is this something that LA and OSIA can work together on?

I would suggest that the concept of a business roadshow that also
highlights the importance of the community would be quite good. We are
at a point where if we don't highlight the importance of the Linux and
Open Source community, businesses will take them for granted, and not
invest in the community as much. This could make is hard to maintain the
sustainable environment we currently have.

Installfests however are a local thing. Running national installfests
was much more interesting when people hadn't seen this stuff and Linux
was hard to install. Now the most interesting thing at an installfest is
weird hardware that walks through the door :) I heard at a recent SLUG
installfest people were dropping machines off to the volonteers
expecting to pick them up completed :)

More to come in the meeting summary today/tomorrow.
<snip>
Pia
-- 
Pia Smith <pia at linux.org.au>
Linux Australia