[Announce] Linux Australia Community Update & LCA2021 Information

Wed May 6 12:41:43 AEST 2020

Dear All,

Wow, suffice to say this isn’t something that I thought I would need to 
send. But then again, is anything we are currently doing “Business As 
Usual”?

This is about the time that we start our full planning mode for 
linux.conf.au, assemble our Session Selection Committee, announce our 
Grants program and our subcommittees start making their announcements. 
But this year is a little different. You may have already seen that the 
PyCon AU subcommittee has announced PyConline AU for 2020 and everything 
is underway to deliver this to our community.

Which brings me to an update for you about Linux Australia’s recent 
activity and what is happening to LCA2021.

Advocacy:

Linux Australia is continuing to advocate for our community. We recently 
signed an open letter [0] calling the Government of Australia to be open 
and transparent in regards to the “COVIDSafe” app. We joined nearly 100 
Academics and Industry Experts calling for this. Signing was important 
for Linux Australia because we have an obligation to our community to 
advocate for open and transparent standards. It is one of our Values [1] 
and not signing this would be doing our community a dis-service. I have 
received lots of fantastic feedback and support which tells me that we 
are headed in the right direction.

Our Mailing Lists:

A reminder to all that we have mailing lists available [2]. I would like 
to stress (very strongly) that we have a mailing list conduct policy 
which is found in our GitHub account [3]. We want this to be a safe and 
inclusive environment just like our conferences. If you don’t want to 
want to abide by this policy please feel free to unsubscribe.

Grants Program:

We would like to change tact for this year’s grants program and 
specifically focus on supporting initiatives, projects and groups to get 
through this time with technology and access. Funding could be provided 
to support projects such as improved documentation and user experience 
around web-conferencing software to make it more accessible for those 
who may not understand technology as we do. Or it may go to help develop 
a web-conferencing solution to suit our conferences and events. An 
official email opening the 2020 Grants Program will be sent out in the 
coming days. Please stay tuned for more info.

We now come to what everyone is really reading this email for….

LCA2021:

Linux Australia, the LCA Ghosts and the LCA2021 team have come together 
in the last month and discussed the next steps for us and what we should 
do with our beloved conference. We have decided that it is for the best 
to postpone LCA2021 to LCA2022. We have secured the 2022 dates with the 
Australian National University events booking team. We felt that this 
was our best option after considering a number of factors:

 1.

    There may not be a vaccine available by January 2021.

 2.

    Opening Call for Sessions during a lockdown is hard to do as
    speakers can’t guarantee that they can travel today, tomorrow or
    January.

 3.

    Being realistic about the safety of our International Delegates: if
    there is still no vaccine for COVID-19 we can’t reasonably expect
    our delegates to go into 2 weeks quarantine on either side of our
    conference.

 4.

    The safety of our Volunteers is paramount.

But LCA is my yearly pilgrimage! What does this mean?

We will be running LCA Online!

I will be putting a call out for some volunteers to help me put together 
an online conference. This conference will be light touch, with minimal 
overheads. If you have any talk ideas keep them brewing. Was there a 
talk you gave at LCA 10 years ago and now that you’re 10 years on is 
your opinion still the same? Is that project still even a thing? So keep 
an eye out on our various channels for a call for volunteers and a call 
for talks. Looking forward to seeing what can be put together for you.

We hope that you are all keeping safe and well during this time of 
craziness. Please keep and eye out for more updates coming in the near 
future. Remember that these times are troubling and unknown for all of 
us so I urge you to please be kind to each other.

If you have any questions or concerns please do contact myself or Council.

Thanks,

Sae Ra

[0] https://covidapp.opentransparent.org/

[1] https://linux.org.au/about-us/values/

[2] https://lists.linux.org.au/mailman/listinfo

[3] 
https://github.com/linuxaustralia/constitution_and_policies/blob/master/mail-list-policy.md 

-- 
Sae Ra Germaine
President
Linux Australia

president at linux.org.au
http://linux.org.au

Linux Australia Inc
GPO Box 4788
Sydney NSW 2001
Australia

ABN 56 987 117 479

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