[Announce] President's Report - August 2010

[John Ferlito]

It’s been just over a month since my last presidents report, which according to
past presidents means that I’m doing well. Apparently the first report is the
easy one, maintaining momentum is the key!

LCA2011
=======

We are now well and truly into the run up to linux,conf.au 2011. The LCA Call
for Papers, Miniconfs, Posters and Tutorials (that is quite a mouthful!), has
been open since the 13th of July. The CFP closes at midnight tonight, so it’s
still not too late to get a proposal in.

Everyone should spend the next 5 minutes thinking of the one person or topic
they would love to be able to listen to at LCA next year. Now, go and email
that person and convince them to submit something. But hurry, you don’t have
long.

The Paper Review Committee will be performing an online review of all the
papers over the next 2 weeks. They will then meet in Sydney for a final one day
review to decide what makes it into the conference. I’ve been involved in the
process for the last few years, and I can tell you that it is not an easy
process. The quality of the submissions we receive for LCA each year is
extremely high and it is a very difficult task to whittle down 200-300
submissions into the 90 or so proposals we have space for.

LCA2012 Bid process
===================

Submissions for LCA2012 close on the 15th of August, which is tomorrow night!
So far we have had an expression of interest from Ballarat, and the odd rumour
that other cities also have some teams thinking about it.

Once the bids come in, the council will take time to review them, and then we
will begin visiting each team so that they can pitch their bid to us in person
why they should earn the honour of hosting the next LCA.

This year we have changed the process slightly and asked all the teams to post
their submission publicly. I’m looking forward to reading the proposals and
having a healthy community discussion about which city should host LCA.

Software Freedom Day
====================

Software Freedom Day is just around the corner, being held on the 18th of
September. SFD is a worldwide celebration of FOSS and also serves to educate
the general public about the benefits of FOSS.

According to the SFD website, it looks like we have about 6 teams registered in
Australia. Noticeably missing are most of our capital cities. Please bring up
SFD at your next LUG meeting  or on your LUGs mailing list and try to organise
an event in your area.

This year Linux Australia will be assisting SFD teams by providing schwag from
past LCAs to give away at events. You should see an email to the list with more
details about this shortly.

Also don’t forget that when you register your team on the official SFD website,
Software Freedom International will send out SFD schwag for you to use on the
day.

Australian Treasury Department, SBR and Auskey (Update)
=======================================================

As I mentioned last month, I’ve been doing some work in my capacity as
President as well as my day job in regards to creating an Open Source project
around the Australian Treasury’s Standard Business Reporting (SBR) project.

We recently held a meeting with some representatives from the Department of
Treasury, where we were able to discuss our plans and what is required to make
SBR and Auskey available for the Open Source community. SBR have shown a keen
interest in the project and have been quite helpful in making resources and
people available to help us with the project.

SBR have also recently announced that they will be supporting Linux on the
AusKey website. This has not been possible up till this point as a browser
plug-in is required to be able to interact with Auskey. SBR hopes to have a
solution released by the end of the year and will be initially supporting
Ubuntu. This means that Australian businesses using Open Source Software will
soon be able to submit their BASs online again.

Cheers,
John


-- 
John
Blog                             http://www.inodes.org
LCA2010                          http://www.lca2010.org.nz