 Who's presenting? Who is Linux Australia? Cool. Thank you. We'll get to who is Linux Australia. I'll just go into a bit more about who I am first. So I work for Rackspace from my home in Tasmania, which is lovely. They have given me a bit of time to work on this talk, so I thank them for allowing me to do that and work hours. I'm also the president of Linux Australia. In the past I've been the treasurer. I've been involved with Linux Australia in various activities for about eight plus years or so. So I've helped organize LCA. I've been the co-chair of Python AU, and I've generally been involved in those conferences, other conferences that we run from an advisory point of view or giving input where appropriate for some years. So that's just a little bit about me. So a little bit of a spoiler that this talk doesn't actually have a very good ending because I don't necessarily have good answers some of the things that I want to cover. And if you're actually asking who is Linux Australia, well, the spoiler there is it's you guys, it's the members, it's not the council or the people at the front, it's all of us. But hopefully that will become a bit clearer. So if we actually do a look up on the org, just from a purely structural point of view, this is what you get. We're an organization of around over 3,000 people incorporated in 1999. It's administered by a council, so they have the authority to act on the organization's behalf. The council delegates authority to 16 subcommittees to do various activities. The conferences that we run are run as subcommittees and that's how we delegate authority to them to be able to execute on those. And so in reality there are hundreds of members actually putting together things like these conferences or doing things like freedom of information requests to governments. But I probably don't need to poll this particular room but now I'm interested who's the first LCA here because there's actually a lot of new people. Cool. All right. And who doesn't know what Linux Australia is? And who... Sorry, was that your hand up there? I don't know. Okay, cool. That's good. And who has been involved with Linux Australia either on the council, by running a conference, by volunteering, by buying coffee for Rusty. So, pretty much everyone... Who made coffee once? That counts? Cool. Pretty much if you're here, you are part of Linux Australia. You're part of our community. Even if you're not a member, we consider you to be part of our community. And if you're not a member, you can go to our website and become one. In 2003, at the end of 2003, so really only 14 months ago, we did a survey of our membership and we found a lot of our members who actually didn't have a fantastic idea of who we are. And so that was a little bit of an issue and I felt like perhaps we should try and address that. So, part of this talk stems from that. The other thing with the survey that we've been doing is using it to drive the organisation's direction. So, some of the responses we got looked a fair bit like this, where member awareness, things we did was generally a bit low. That's not fantastic. We identified a bunch of priorities that the council identified and decided to take these to our members and see how they matched with their thoughts on what Linux Australia should be doing. H is one I'll point out because only just more than half of the people were aware that one of our goals is to increase our influence in the IT sector. So, mostly around what our values are, such as our thoughts on where patent, things like that, digital products. And yet, in average importance, that was rated as the most important. So, most people know Linux Australia as the organisation who runs conferences. We run this conference, if that wasn't clear, simply from an administration point of view. But we also run seven other conferences, our regular ones include a Python conference, a Drip conference, a WordPress conference, and we're always open to more conferences in the open source realm, so to speak. So, our members also had this feedback as well, sorry. So, they wanted to do more advocacy work in Australia. They had a high degree of confidence in the council, which I think is interesting to point out because from the council's point of view, we're not the ones doing the work. We want to be enabling our members to do the work. And so, there seems to be a discrepancy here between what the members expect us to do and what the council actually does do. And certainly in the past, we've had a lot of people say to us, well, Linux Australia should do this. Well, we should have a mailing list to discuss this problem or we should rewrite this proprietary software into open source software. And it often falls to the council to be doing these things while they're very limited resources. The entire organization is volunteering, and that's from the council down to the lovely people who checked you into the conference. So, there's a bit of an expectation mismatch where we actually need members to be engaged in these issues or areas that they are passionate about rather than just the council. So, let's do a little bit of a history lesson, which is interesting for me too because, like I said, I've been involved for eight years, which is about half the organization's life. So, I'm actually going to be very wrong. Please correct me if I'm wrong. Sadly, a few people would hope to be here, aren't at the conference in general, to tell me when I'm wrong. But I've tried to kind of collect some information and do a bit of digging. So, I want you to imagine back to 1999, Linux's desktops looked a bit like this. Mobile phones were... This is the end of this. I mean, big chunky ones. I dress like this. The internet sounded like this. And I said sounded because it's all in your mind now. And Linux user groups looked like that. They were reasonably lively and active. And this is actually a photo taken from an install fest where people are actually installing Linux. So, Linux user groups were very active in the late 90s, maybe even the early 2000s, where people would get together and learn how to install Linux and debug problems and fix complicated hardware that is otherwise too difficult for the average person to install. And don't forget, probably Linux came on, like, 20 floppy disks at that time, too. So, actually, the other important reads in Linux user groups was that sharing of information was a lot harder without the internet being so predominant. In particular, downloading distributions would be very, very slow. I actually remember, downloading distributions would be by the Linux magazines and CDs attached. Yeah, a lot of people printed CDs to give away from the recording. So, yes, the first thing in our timeline is actually Linux.org.au. I did a bit of a way back machine look up and it looked like this. And it existed before the very first Linux conference or before the organization existed. I don't know when the first iteration of the website actually was, but this is as far back as I could go and it existed to provide mailing lists, an IRC channel, a point of conversation for Linux users. It had things like a list of Linux kernel contributors, so we actually named them, like, people who had patches in the kernel. So, we weren't an organization. We didn't have a voice for our members and we basically just spread a bit of information about Linux and maybe open source. So, then enter our first, whoops, conference, the conference of Australian Linux users. Rusty Russell decided it would be nice to have a meet-up of Australian users who are interested in Linux. So, he infamously put it on his own credit card while Lugs would collect money from him and they would turn up with a big water cache to pay for his debt. Thankfully, it worked. And it's the first evidence of this particular community coming together. And the classic story told is how the conference didn't have t-shirts. Every conference has t-shirts. And so, the delegates saw a bug. And rather than just posting a bug report, they attached a patch. They went to the local shop, bought a bunch of plain shirts, ironed on the logos, and sold them at cost. And what we saw was our members pulling together to put together this conference. It was a community conference who ran by the community. It wasn't run by business people. It wasn't run by professionals. It was run by the community because it was a community conference. We get plenty of bug reports without patches. I really like the ones with patches. We had a keynote by John Maddell Cole, who still is around in our community, even though he lives in America, which is cool. And this is Rusty. And I'm going to play a snippet from the conference because I think it's interesting. Hi, it's Rusty. I think the conference went really well. I've been really happy with all the attendees, especially. Especially the people who jumped in and helped. It's been very much a community kind of event. It's actually been really good fun, although very tiring. So I'm looking forward to getting some sleep on Monday. Any plans for anything in the following years? Well, we're looking at maybe combining with the big con that's going to be in Sydney in March. We might join forces with them, or we might go our separate ways. We're still looking into that. So definitely people want us to do it again. But I'm not sure that I want to be at the helm again. So we'll see how it goes. But there's definitely scope for a big Linux con in Australia. There's scope for a big Linux con in Australia, right? Yeah, absolutely. So there's a big version that Rusty had and some other people as well, of course. And look at where we are today. There is a big Linux conference in the Australian New Zealand region. And I think he also pointed out how we pulled together those communities to do that. So I think that's really excellent. So Linux Chainlink Incorporated at the end of 1999 to be the legal entity to oversee the conference that we were running. And that's basically to do things like GST filings, be other general legal entity stuff, buy insurance, whatever else you need to do. And so in 2001, the first linux.conf.au was ran. So it was about a year and a half from Cali. And it was called LCA. We were able to trick someone into giving us the .conf.au domain, which now no longer exists. In fact, the Australian Domain Authority have tried to delete that namespace. But thanks to the hard work of some of our members, in particularly Steve Walsh, we've been grandfathered into keeping it. So we are now the only people in the world with the .conf.au domain. So I think that's kind of cool. And that's our brand new for our conference. So it's very important to us. We call it LCA. In fact, we call it linux.conf.au and you don't have to talk about the URL now, except everyone's like, that's not a URL. Anyway, so 2002 happened, the conference that is, and LCA 2003 was coming up. NPOA thought we could do better. She saw that we were lacking a voice at a national level for linux and open source advocacy. We had local user groups, but we weren't necessarily communicating or collaborating or sharing resources very effectively. There was a lack of any particular body for senators or other government organizations to approach and get input on important issues that were in line with our values of open or free. So PS said we can do better and started talking to the members. Well, actually, sorry, at this point, there was only five members of LCA and that happened to be the committee. So she started talking to those guys, as well as the extended community, which was everyone at LCA in Perth. And they decided to hold the first open AGM. And I say it like that because you actually can't have an AGM without members. So they signed up everyone who was at Perth to be a member automatically. So you came to the conference, you are now a member of LCA. And so they had their first AGM and they looked at it. And what do you suppose the very first thing was that happened after that? It's happened very regularly in our community still. Give you a hint, very close. Bike shooting, of course. Mostly around the constitutional crisis that you can't just sign members up like they did. So anyway, we won't go into the details. We got through it and we solved it, but it was just an interesting little side that we still have this inherent problem. And it would be nice to focus on what's important to us. But we also want to do it right, right? We can't just sign up members. There's a balance to be had. So you've got to remember this is a time of proprietary software. Windows was dominant. Most friends and family didn't have a clue what Linux is now. Most people have heard of it. Even Mac back in the early 2000s was pretty limited. So a computer was Windows. But it was also a time of proprietary systems in government. Open source wasn't even considered. Documents were published in proprietary formats and open formats weren't even considered. So it was a time that we're all very restricted and locked down. So one of the goals of Linux is to be a reasonable voice to engage with government, to engage with these issues rather than just to slant the government. And so we saw some years of good growth. We grew from five to 3,000 odd members over from that line of scope between 2003 and 2007 or 2008. Various things happened. Like the organization submitted against the free trade agreement that was going on, which is very similar to the TPP that is currently happening. And we were known as a voice to be contacted. For example, various members in our community were invited to partake in discussions at various Senate meetings. We helped get Lawrence Lisig down to Australia. We started the grants program, which is a program that still runs today which allows people to submit to the council to get funding for various activities that are in line with our values. And we were, I think, some of the most per capita or something run software-free in days. So we had a real advocacy voice, an outreach voice of the importance of Linux and open source. So we were from the average people on the street, advocating to them all the way up to the government who, you know, we disagreed with why are they publishing data in proprietary formats or not publishing it at all, which was a very common case. And much like the kind of aim of the council now, the aim of the council then was to enable the enthusiasm of the members to allow members to do these things, such as lobbying to the government. You know, lots of people would say Linux is how they should do XYZ, then they wouldn't. So a lot of, although this is what we intended, a lot of what was actually happening, but in this part of the time period, was happening by the council. It was people like Peer War, Andrew Trigel and those types who were actually doing the hard works in standing up against some of the issues that we, that I've mentioned. So some time passes and the organization, which kind of naturally goes back to the states that I was in around 2001, 2002, which was to purely exist for the purposes of running a Linux conference and not much else. So that was around 2008 to 2010. Then we saw a good bit of growth in the practical scope of what the community was doing. Specifically, we saw the adoption of a lot more conferences. So let's go over the timeline of our conferences very briefly. It's actually kind of tangential, but it's interesting. So the Kali was the first one, and then we move on to our LCA's that had run every year consistently from 2001 all the way up to 2010. 2010 and 2006 were in New Zealand. So it was 2006 where we crossed that border. In 2010, we added a new regular or a new conference that would become a regular, Pike on AU. In 2011, we added Drupal Down Under, which has had a few different names, but A Drupal Conference every year in Australia. And we did other smaller events like bar camps, WordPress started coming in, and one who were very close to becoming a regular. I'm not sure if they're planning on one this year or not. But this year alone, sorry, 2004 alone, we ran eight conferences. So that's quite a testament to just how much our community has put into these conferences. And these conferences, of course, help spread our goals, our values. They raise important issues. We see good discussions. We just look at the keynote on Tuesday morning. So I keep referring to our values, and it might not be overly clear to you what they are. These are our values in dot point form. I think I've had more time. I would have done probably five slides on each of those. You can actually unpack them a long way. Open technology refers to open software, open data, open government, things like that. It's not just restricted to software. We also care about hardware and so on. Open APIs, being able to access things. Community refers to us. We value the creation, the support, the maintenance of our community. We want to be engaged with our community. Freedom, we value freedom in the use and development of open technologies. It's one thing that how most TVs run Linux now, but I actually can't plug into my TV and reflash the firmware. My freedoms are limited. We strongly encourage the use of free software, and the next one was respect, which of course is evident by just how inclusive and respectful we are as a conference. And diversity, which similarly ties into respect. We care for people of all ages, genders, backgrounds, nationalities and so forth. So those are our values. We wrote these values and the reason is here in the timeline in about 2011, but they were very evident before then. So this is what our community stands for. This is who Linux Australia is. So interestingly, actually, if you go read the full text of the values, Linux isn't mentioned once in there. We mention openness, we mention freedom. We mention intellectual property, we mention hardware. We don't mention software, we don't mention Linux. So we actually have a bit of an identity crisis where our name does not match what we care about. Or what we've been lobbying for for the last decade. We've tried to change this name in the past with failed success. We barely, we didn't even get consensus that we should change the name, let alone what to. These are some of the options. And so it's an ongoing struggle for us where we are trying to be a voice at a national level to represent issues that are important to us that we value and that people confuse us with an operating system. Now, I'm not saying we need to change the name. I think we should. I am not going to tackle that as president this term. I think we need to focus on some other issues that I'm about to get to. However, it's important to realise that I think this is where we're heading. And if it's not where we want to be heading, then members should speak up. Maybe we do just want to be a Linux group, because the truth is we listen to our members. It's not the council, it's the members, right? So we're basically now at present day. What are we doing now? Who are we made up of? So we do conferences. Like I said, we provide the overhead for the conferences. So the council delegates the authority to volunteers who organise the logistics and they ensure that speakers come from overseas or wherever else. We give them bank accounts, insurance, advice, anything else that you can think of will help out. We also help out with the transition from year to year. A lot of these conferences are regular and ongoing. So we help with the handover of that information. How to run a conference. What does a Linux conference look like compared to a Python conference? What is it that makes up the fuel and the kind of the vibe to use a horrible word of a conference? So we want to make sure there's some continuity between it. And that's kind of what we do as an organisation. And a lot of our members are involved in that. We've also got a bunch of other subcommittees that we delegate authority to. So the admin team makes sure our servers run nice and smoothly. So that's our Linux.org.au servers. Our mailing list servers, they also help provide services to conferences so they can put their websites up. A couple of other groups who have asked for instances in the open source realm, we've been able to assist in that regard. Tightly coupled to the admin team is the mirror team who help mirror things such as the Debian project or archive of all our videos from our conferences and ensure that they're available and licensed correctly. We have an AV subcommittee who are working on new hardware streaming and also a bunch of other stuff to make sure that we can be doing the awesome video recordings that we're doing at these conferences. We have a web team who maintain both the content and the structure of the website. We also have three lugs formed of subcommittees. So another service that we are able to provide to our members is we're able to take away from some of the admin's trivia that organisations, well, sorry, that groups would otherwise have to form to hold their Linux user groups. So Slug, Login and Haslug don't need to be a formed entity. They don't need to have bank accounts. They don't need to have insurance. We can help provide that for them. And we have a media and comms team who help, or are supposed to help at the moment. There's not many people on that committee form press releases and engage with our members do a newsletter. And so it's interesting, like, I'm pointing all these out because the members of these committees will come in and out of them as with the council, which is re-elected every year. So even though these guys are the ones with the authority that's been delegated by the council, they're not necessarily the ones doing the work. For example, the media committee would receive articles from anybody and help publish them. In fact, anyone showing an interest could be invited to be on these teams, or frankly, they could put their hand up and would welcome the help. Further to that, we would also, if someone said, well, take Michael, for example, who's doing a freedom of information request to get the source code for easy count, the council can support him and the community can support him, both financially and in kind. Like, this is something that we can put our voice behind. But again, our voice is no longer actually recognised. So I think that's something we need to be thinking about. So I actually just went over most of these, the grants I mentioned before, supporting various activities such as travel grants, supporting open source development where appropriate, advocacy, something we want to get better at. But also, what would you like us to do? You guys are our members, right? We rely on you to help drive the direction of the organisation. And so I've been touching on a lot of our challenges and I mentioned them as challenges to our whole organisation, so this should be all 3,000 plus of us, not just the council. What does open source being so mainstream mean? I think Linux and open source are generally well-received technologies. Most companies are using them to some extent or recognise their importance or contribute to them. You know, do we still need to advocate in these areas? I think they need to be less of a focus for us than they were in the past, for example. And what does the popularity of mobile and web platforms mean for open source? I think actually Stolman was onto something with GPLV3. I don't necessarily advocate for that licence, but he certainly saw that we are heading into a state where all our data is not controlled by us. That data is not free. We don't have access to it. We're storing it with various companies. What does that mean for us and our members? Is it something that violates our values? Do we care about these enough, these issues enough to advocate for them? And you know, how do we extend our ideals to an open web, open data, open government, open hardware and open culture? I think we've done an OK job with some of these, such as open source. We have people fighting hard for our values in the government. The government is getting better at publishing data under open formats. So I think some of them we're doing OK at, but some we're doing terrible at. I think this is more of a local conversation than a Linux conversation. A Linux-Australian conversation, I should say. Although we did form with the intention of being a national voice, I think that lugs are less relevant than they used to be, that the internet has reduced the necessity of them, and that now they serve very well as a social get-together or social club. And because we have such a diverse range of conferences, that's where we're getting most of our content from. And thanks to the ease of open source and Linux and the internet, there's less of a need for install fests or simply how do I use this thing that I could have Googled for? Another challenge we have are we still connected to our members. As I showed at the beginning, our membership survey showed that we were rather disconnected from our members. Maybe that's because we have a lot of members on our organization who came to one LCA and they never came again, and they don't necessarily see themselves as a member, but maybe we should remove them from our database, for example. But either way, I think we're doing a poor job of communicating to our members. I think unless people are reading the minutes of the council or seeing the general chat list, we haven't engaged very well with our members, and I think that's something we need to get better at. And I don't just say that that the council needs to get better at it. I think members need to get better at it. Again, the council shouldn't be the people doing the work. Are we still a national voice? I don't think we are. We're not approached by senators or anyone to get input for important issues. Is this something that we want to strive to become? Because there's a lot of work. And do we need to update our communication platforms? Social media, for example, versus mailing lists and IRC. Are we alienating a generation of people who aren't used to using these technologies? So I think the biggest question for us is how do we ensure that our values are powered in our industries? This is in my president's report, and I want our members to be thinking about this seriously. So that's where we are now. And naturally, the next thing is where do we go from here? Well, like I said, I don't have good... There's not a good ending to this talk because it's not the council that actually drives the direction right. I think we all need to be thinking about these issues and thinking about how we can make... So, you know, if you're keen to be involved, if I've spoken about... You think, yeah, we should be doing that. Could you help? Well, do you know someone who could help? You know who would be willing to help? We are not meeting our potential. There are various practical ways that we are involved, such as organizing a conference, volunteering to, you know, run around boxes or check people in. There's the admin team, the mirror team. You could run to be in the council for 2016 or onwards, the selections just closed. You could help run us off for Freedom Day, which would be kind of more public advocacy. Local user groups, I think, they still have a role, particularly in terms of having that local bond and community. Lobbying, this is something I think is, again, in the survey, one of the most important things that we should be doing, yet it's one of the things we do most poorly because we don't have people who are particularly good that have time to do what I should say because it is a lot of work. So if it's something you're interested in, I think it's something that our community would get behind and support you with. It's very something I'm interested in. Knowing this talk, the previous people who have been involved in the organization, unfortunately, they're not here now or else they'd be telling me I got all their stories wrong. But I like how Tridge put it, sorry, how Rusty put it. You know, if our community is a Tesla, Linux Australia provides a charge station. It doesn't provide the car nor the drivers, but a bit of fueling is all we need. It works well. I think the council does not achieve anything for what the community does. Thank you. Questions? If it's short, I can repeat it. Yeah, I think you've done a great conference here. My question really is what sort of presence apart from the conference has Linux Australia got in New Zealand? Well, we did run a Drupal conference here. We're also New Zealand Open Source Society, is that what they called, quite aware of us and we try and keep in contact with them. We haven't actually had any real overlap there, but I think would be, you know, very supportive of most of the things that they did and they asked us for help would be happy to help. But there's no reason why this, the water needs to divide us, right? So I think there's some, some of the lobbying stuff might look a little bit differently, but if there were people in New Zealand who wanted to lobby to the New Zealand Government on particular issues, I suspect you would have the support of our community on that as much as a person in Australia would lobbying to our Government. Is there a strong membership base in New Zealand? Good question. I don't know the action numbers. We have a decent membership base. Thanks, Elsie, for having visited here a few times. Kathy has volunteered to get the data for the recording. Data being how many New Zealand members we have. You mentioned a few teams earlier. If you're interested in being part of those teams, how would you go about it? Sure. Send an email to the team if you know their contact. For example, the admin team is admin.linux.org. If you don't know their contact, just ask. You can ask the council, which is council.linux.org.au. Come and approach me. I'd be more than happy to introduce you to people involved in those teams. Frankly, some of those teams basically have a team of zero. So if you'd like doing web stuff, come talk to me because I'd love some help there. And I will give you some root keys and you can have fun. Any other questions? Does Linux Australia have a Facebook page? I believe we do. I am not on Facebook. We do. And it is? I suspect if you search for it, you'll probably recognise our logo. But Kathy will tell you, I'm sure. The way I believe we view social media is basically to re-announce announcements so we'll publish, we're doing the call for papers for LCA. And then that will get posted on the Facebook and Twitter. We actually have a couple of accounts which might be confusing. For example, there's the Linux Australia Twitter account, but there's also the Linux ConfU Twitter account. So we're not the best at not being confusing. Some of our groups also have their own accounts, so WordCamp will do tweets on their hashtags. They probably put event pages up. And it is interesting to watch because our members do actually just take things and run with it, which is actually the intention. So we've got things like linear pages, and event-bright pages, or not event-brightness. What is the meeting-up one? Is it just meet-up? Yeah, that one. Like, there's meet-up pages for our events as well because our members just go and create these pages, which is excellent. They don't need to come to the council or to the web team or anything like that and be like, oh, I need to... I want to put this over here. They just go and do it. That's a real example of someone finding a bug and submitting the patch. What I'll do to address that action item is send out a full list of Linux Australia's social media to the chat list. Any other questions? Cool. Can I ask you guys a question? What do you guys feel that we should be doing as a community? Can you put your hand up to answer a question? That one's new. And I don't often do that. It sounds to me like we really need to, you know, get a vision, a sense of vision from the community and build a planner out it and start working towards it. Easy to say, but that's a long process, but worth doing. I think we need to get more people along to talks like this. I'm not sure how we do that, but I'm in this... There are a fair few people in this talk, but I suspect a lot of us already know the information they've given us. Incidentally, that was a great history. I didn't know a lot about that stuff. Advertising, you know, more... I don't know the answer, but if we've got more people into this kind of talk, if we did it as a keynote, potentially, you know, to say... Or at the beginning of a keynote, you know, this is the kind of stuff that we're looking for. We might get more people who are more aware of it. Yeah, so amazing awareness. I think it's an issue that a lot of organisations have, and I think that one thing you've got to emphasise is that, you know, if you help out, you don't have to do everything. If you do it just a little bit, that's still helpful. Yeah, every bit counts. Thank you. It was two questions around here. Sorry, did you have a... Thanks very much. In my view, and this is just my humble opinion, it's not a view that's endorsed in any way by council, present or past. I actually think that there will be significant value in crowdsourcing and working on a five- to ten-year blueprint or strategy for Linux Australia as the organisation evolves in response to strategic imperatives. Josh has mentioned my Bollum Web. Our very own government has forces coalescing that seek to curtail our freedoms and surveillance. There are some incredible forces on us at the moment, and I still think there's a massive place for Linux Australia. We just need to shift slightly what we do and how we do it, and I'd very much like to see a five- to ten-year strategy that's crowdsourced with the input of the broader community and other communities with whom we interact regularly. Thank you. So, at the AGM, it was suggested that we try and meet up and have a discussion about this. It was suggested right at lunchtime. I think it would probably be in OGBB 4. So, if you're interested in continuing this, and I'll send a proper announcement to the mailing list in the morning, but otherwise, there's no other questions. I'll finish there. Josh, we just had a small gift to give to you for speaking today. Thank you. So, thanks very much. Cheers.