Tue, 05 Jul 2005
Online Debating Is So Hot Right Now
Okay, I admit it, I left the tv on after Desperate Housewives, and not only caught Last Man Standing, but a small amount of the Hiltons’ Simple Life 3 - Interns. Anyway, having been referenced by name in the prestigious Australian IT press, how could I not continue the thread I left dangling last week?
So, the question is “if LA’s not doing anything other than LCA, how does it make any sense to have a separate group of people over and above the ones volunteering a year of their life to run the conference?” I think the answer is “but that’s not the case; LA is doing other things and should continue doing so.”
I gave a talk to HUMBUG on Saturday about LA, which was (IMO) pretty well attended. Especially since the usual staple of HUMBUG meetings – free net access so people can bring their computers along and do hands on Linux/Unix stuff – is currently absent. I’d intended to record it and then try my hand at this new-fangled podcasting stuff, but then found myself running late and completely forgot. Doh. Short summary is that it’s quite possible to fill up about three-quarters of an hour talking about LA stuff without just summarising the content at the last LCA, and the broader stuff is pretty interesting – Community Code, Open Education, Software Freedom Day, the Open Source Forums, the government participation in Linux that LA tries to facilitate, the grants scheme, and the random other things that all make use of the LA banner, whether metaphorically or literally.
Of course, while these things are interesting, that’s a different question to whether they’ll be a success or not. It’s easy to come up with a cool idea, and it’s even easy to register a domain for it, and maybe write up some of your ideas; it’s a lot harder to carry them through to fruition.
I actually think LA might be in a position this year to actually cover that gap. Naturally, I’m going to credit that to the community’s wise choice of committee members and their varied skillsets and the resulting organisational dynamic, but the fact that the Linux community has come up with a range of projects and the fact that previous committees’ activity has managed to improve LA’s mindshare within the community has resulted in a pretty large number of groups coming together around LA – and with a large enough number of attempts, you’re likely to have some successes no matter how great the difficulties. And once you’ve got some successes, you can build on them and get still more.
And that, I think, is the position LA’s in at the moment; trying to cultivate some more initial successes beyond LCA, and getting prepared to build on those successes by watching what goes right (and wrong), and having the resources marshalled to make sure those lessons can get reused.
One of the things I really enjoy about the LA community is its optimism; so when we get a story in the press that announces “[t]he future of Linux Australia (LA) is in doubt”, the response is along the lines of:
It’s great that something as trifling as a discussion of LA’s organisational structure is not only considered newsworthy, but deserving of a well-researched article. […] Coverage like this demonstrates LA’s relevence beyond the LA membership, and will hopefully invite constructive comment from the broader Australian Linux community.
Better than some possible responses anyway.
Fri, 01 Jul 2005
I’m giving a talk on debbugs at debconf5. Since they’re trying printed proceedings and are planning on handing them out in advance of the talks, I wrote up a paper that should be useful background material for people interested in hacking on debbugs. This is the abstract:
This paper aims to serve as a useful reference for people attending the talk of the same title at DebConf 5, to be held in Helsinki, Finland from the 9th to the 16th of July 2005. It summarises the primary motivations behind the design philosophy of debbugs, the on-disk data formats debbugs uses, and the overall structure of the code. It aims to provide sufficient background on the current status of the debbugs codebase that the interested reader may use as a basis for beginning to hack on the debbugs codebase. Basic familiarity with debbugs from a user’s perspective is assumed.
And you can find it on my CodeWiki.
I’m also meant to be doing a BOF on debootstrap. It seems to have turned into some sort of faux-keynote, being the first talk of the first day without any other scheduled activity, which it’s massively unsuitable for. I’ve tried harassing the organisers into changing it for me, but they seem to want me to spend my time before leaving finding some other speaker to swap with, which I don’t have time for. On the upside, if nothing happens and I remain with an effective keynote slot, I have hatched an evil alternative plan, albeit one that crucially relies on the exact scheduling given. If it eventuates, folks looking to attend a debootstrap BOF should probably expect an unofficial one over a lunch sometime instead.
In other timetabling news, it seems Mark Shuttleworth is giving a talk on a small project called Unubtu or something. Apparently there’s not much interest, and most people will be going to Junichi Uekawa’s library packaging talk instead. Talks on obscure topics like the DSFG are also, unsurprisingly, not attracting much interest.
More minutes and such: a second face to face session (covering organisational strategy, media strategy, projects review and some other stuff) which went over a second day (covering and included a formal session, as well as two formal meetings in May, one covering general business, the other specifically for some formal LCA2006 stuff immediately after the Ghosts weekend.
Unfortunately the cool task tracker we set up at the start of the year isn’t turning out very effective. It’s got one problem in that it’s entirely public, so you can’t track topics that have any sort of “in confidence” aspect, nor can you track setup issues on LA boxes that have a security aspect. The other problem seems to be that it just hasn’t fit in with the committee’s routine, which seems harder to fix.
As a different approach, and to much eagerness from the Vice-President, we’ve setup a committee wiki which will hopefully help both with coordinating efforts within the committee and amongst other folks involved with LA, and with getting info on what’s going on out to people in a vaguely sane way. So far it’s a bit sparse. In theory, we’re also trying to blog more about LA stuff.
I guess that brings us, by way of Jon’s demurely titled blog entry Can Linux Australia survive?, to our next topic. LA’s always been an odd beast. AIUI from talking to other HUMBUGgers, it was initially noticed by the community when some LUGs wanted to get together and create a national group to organise LUGs (AusLUG, perhaps?) then someone noticed “Linux Australia” already existed in somethin of a “wtf??” moment. Bruce of HUMBUG (HUMBUG’s Democratically Elected Vice-President For Life And Beyond, well, kinda) seems to have then setup a list – and you can find the early archives of the “linux-aus” mailing list amongst HUMBUG’s list archives, including this gem: