Saturday 19 September 2009

Software Freedom Day 2008: The Hub@Docklands

Software Freedom Day - Melbourne, Australia

Update! SFD in 2009 is on Saturday 19th September! The Melbourne Team is gearing up now to put on another great event celebrating software freedom along side our friends right around the world!

Check back again soon for details on Software Freedom Day 2009 in Melbourne.

For pics of SFD in 2008 see

http://flickr.com/search/?q=sfd-melb

Software Freedom Day is a global, grassroots effort to tell people about the virtues and availability of Free and Open Source Software.Melbourne's various Free and Open Source Software groups join the global celebration for Software Freedom Day with a series of Free Talks on various aspects of the technology and communities that support it. Melbourne's celebration is proudly supported by the Victorian Government.

Venue - The Hub, 17 Waterview Walk, Docklands

We're putting together a great program of talks in The Cinema at our fantastic new venue at Docklands. The HUB is the Docklands community centre and also has a light filled Atrium we'll use for people to mingle and learn more about Software Freedom Day and different technology applications. From Melbourne Wireless, to Open Office, to PHP.

Program of events

11am- Tyson Clugg - Melbourne Wireless

Melbourne's own free network: Melbourne Wireless Melbourne Wireless was founded in 2001 by a group with the idea that the concepts of free software could be used to create a free ISP. Now in 2008, the Melbourne Wireless network provides very high speed broadband Internet to its members on a network that spans the majority of the greater Melbourne metropolitan area. Find out how free software is used by Melbourne Wireless and its members, and how you can become involved in one of the largest free networks on the planet. Tyson Clugg is the current President elect of Melbourne Wireless Inc and was one of the founding members of the group since it incoorporation in 2001. In his pursuit of network freedom he has spoken to the House of Representatives (Connecting Australia! Wireless Broadband Inquiry), the Melbourne PC Users Group and more recently at LCA '08.

see http://www.melbournewireless.org.au

12pm- Dale Clapperton/Colin Jacobs - Electronic Frontiers Australia

Colin will speak on the Rudd government’s current ‘clean feed’ Internet censorship agenda, and present a comparative analysis of ‘clean feed’ against other Internet censorship regimes around the world.

Dale will discuss legal and policy issues of importance to open software and open software developers, including copyright, contract, and competition law, including recent cases in Australia and the United States of America, and the development of the secretive and worrying ‘Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement’ (ACTA).

Colin & Dale’s presentations will be interactive and participatory, and time permitting, will be followed by a Q&A session. They look forward to the opportunity to meet EFA members and supporters at this significant event

see http://www.efa.org.au

1pm- Kat Clancy, Deakin University on Library 2.0.

Kat Clancy is Library Web Developer at Deakin University and has integrated a number of FOSS technologies with the Library's service offerings to better meet the needs of students, researchers and academics.

see http://www.deakin.edu.au/library

1:30pm- Kathy Reid - 'Free and open source software in education'

Blurb: K-12 and Higher Education institutions have low budgets, but their Millenium Generation students have high expectations and high IT literacy. Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) can help to deliver real value in this sector by providing low-cost, easy to use applications which are easily hosted either by the educational institution or from reasonably priced providers.

  • Using tools such as Moodle and Sakai
  • Firefox and Mozilla as alternative browser and email client
  • Free editors such as GIMP, nVu etc
  • Social and blogging software such as Drupal, Joomla and Wordpress

Kathy Reid wears many hats. She is Problem Manager at Deakin University, specialising in the ITIL Problem Management discipline. She is the Asia-Pacific contact for PHPWomen, an organisation dedicated to helping women learn the PHP programming language and software development in general, and she is active in assisting community based not for profits with their IT requirements. She is sworn enemies with Jareth, Davey Shafik's Evil Cat .

see: http://www.phpwomen.org

see: http://www.phpmelb.org

see: http://blog.kathyreid.id.au

2pm- Brianna Laugher - 'How Free Software makes Wikipedia possible'

Blurb: In just a handful of years, volunteers around the world have create the largest encyclopedia ever known, Wikipedia. It's still growing today, in literally hundreds of languages, and sister projects to provide other free reference works (such as textbooks) are also thriving. But it would have never been possible without the products of the free software movement, and more importantly, the principles. Find out how these principles have inspired a host of related causes in recent years, and how the core idea of sharing continues to resonate not just in software, but also science, academia and education. Bio: Brianna Laugher is a committee member for Wikimedia Australia, a non-profit organisation incorporated in Victoria for Wikimedians living in Australia. She writes on Wikimedia and free culture topics at <http://brianna.modernthings.org/>. She has been a Wikimedia contributor since 2005 and is glad she discovered Wikipedia at the end of her degree and not the start.

See http://www.wikimedia.org.au

3pm- Gerry White, director of the Internet society of Australia

Gerry will be talking about openness: openness in devices (generative as in Zittrain’s work), openness in software operating systems and applications, and openness in the creation of knowledge (content, discussions, copyright, …) all within an ethical framework. Without these the internet as we know it will be severely restricted by government regulation and commercial interests as well as constraining education, training and research which will result in restraints on progress and community participation.

See http://www.isoc-au.org.au

Lightning Talks

There will also be a number of 3 minute“lightning talks” throughout the day.

Demonstrations

There will also be demonstrations of various open source operating systems, software and linux friendly hardware in the venue’s atrium all day. Come and check out what free open source has to offer for your home/office.

Contact

  • For more information about this years event contact peter baker: jellyware at gmail.com 0411 437137 or 03 90149707

Social Networking

To add this event to your favourite social networking site go to;

Facebook: http://www.new.facebook.com/event.php?eid=28380286361

Twitter: http://twitter.com/sfd_melb - account is sfd_melb if you want to follow it

MySpace: http://events.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=events.detail&eventID=454920.03612

Help us collect statements about Software Freedom Day in as many languages as we can! MultiLingualSFD

For More Information see....

General Information about Free and Open Source Software

Press Releases

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