[Linux-aus] Young people and FOSS in Australia

[Chris Neugebauer]

On Tue, Feb 15, 2011 at 10:48, Mary Gardiner <mary at puzzling.org> wrote:

>
> 1. Focussing on getting young people to speak at LCA (or OSDC)
>
> One possibility is a separate student track for, say, major project or
> honours students who did FOSS work and released their code. Perhaps
> targetting students at universities local to the conference.
>
> Couple of things to address:
>  1. lead time. An LCA talk would really need to be a planned outcome of
>    the project, which means getting the supervisors on board at the
>    beginning of the year.
>
>  2. the talk itself. Honours students are accustomed to giving
>    academic-lite talks, which will bore an LCA audience. It's a
>    different genre of talk. Maybe have some kind of preparatory
>    speaking session for them?
>
> Ideally there would be follow-up of some kind to try and get them back
> the next year as attendees. 25% off next year's ticket? Simply a nice
> mail in October saying "that conference you spoke at last year? you
> could totally hang out this year too."


Hi Mary,

The FOSS in Research & Student Innovation miniconf, which I
co-organised with Peter Lyle at LCA2011 was proposed basically for
this purpose, that is, giving younger people an opportunity to present
at LCA.  I certainly would be keen for this miniconf, or something
like it to be run again in 2012, if the interest is there from LA and
the organising committee for 2012.

One thing we did find was that it was difficult to get promotion of
the miniconf amongst many Universities, and we basically ended up
needing to fill one of our slots allocated to students with a Google
Summer of Code talk.  This is something that would need to be
addressed in future, and if help is forthcoming from LA, that'd be
great.

Anyway, I'd be more than happy to talk more on this subject off-list
(or on it, if you'd prefer), as it's an area I have interest in.

--Chris
FRSI2011 Miniconf Co-Organiser



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