[plug] Fwd: lca2014 press release

[Paul Del]

Press Release For Immediate Release

Announcing linux.conf.au 2014

Overview
In January 2014, Perth, Western Australia will be playing host to the
continents premier Linux and open source conference – linux.conf.au.

linux.conf.au draws attendees and speakers worldwide from all spheres of
open source, geeks, hackers, students, professionals, hobbyists, companies,
education, government and business partners, ree lancers etc.
Conference Format
The linux.conf.au conference runs over 5 days from Monday 6th January to
Friday 10th January.

Conference tickets are available at Professional, Hobbyist and Student
levels with associated pricing and perks.

Over the first two days we host a series of mini confs, small single day
conferences covering particular topics. Intended as an incubator for
related technologies and interests that could eventually hold their own
conferences. The mini confs are managed and run as independent conferences
with their own call for papers and management committees.

The remaining three days feature a packed conference schedule, in 2014 we
will be running presentations over 5 simultaneous tracks. Each track will
feature four 45 minute presentations per day. The full programme is
available on our website at http://lca2014.linux.org.au/programme/schedule.

On most days before the main sessions, the conference will open with a
keynote presentation. The keynotes tend to follow a less technical approach
and provide commentary and insight on broad global trends and open source
challenges.
Birds of a Feather Sessions
Run outside the scope of the formal presentation agenda,
linux.conf.auencourages delegates to arrange “Birds of a Feather” -
BOF - sessions on
the Monday and or Tuesday. These draw together people with a specific area
of interest and are run after hours. Typical BOF sessions range from
Astronomy, Video capture, Running, Cycling, Hacking, Open Hardware, Haeksen
and many others. The BOF sessions are a great opportunity to meet and
socialise with like minded people during the conference.
Video and Streaming
All presentations made at linux.conf.au will be recorded and the completed
videos made available for download and online viewing. This year we will be
attempting to provide a live stream of the proceedings too.

Social Events
We have three official social events during the conference
Speakers Dinner(for accepted speakers only)
Penguin Dinner on the Wednesday(everyone is invited)
Professional Delegates Networking session(for professional tickets only)
Almost the forth social event in itself, is the Birds of Feather sessions
BoFs which will be running Monday and or Tuesday evenings.
Various groups and delegates run plenty pre and post unofficial social
events throughout the week. Join in there is always something going on
Be sure to check the wiki website for more information
https://lca2014.linux.org.au/wiki/Social_Events

Partners Programme
lca2014 tries to be as accessible to participants, we are running a
partners programme to provide some entertainment to partners of attendees
who are not interested in participating. Any one is welcome to register and
join in here https://lca2014.linux.org.au/wiki/Partners_programme
Child Care
We also arrange a creche facility to care for children while delegates are
attending the conference during the day.
We have organised and paid for two professionally certified child care
workers https://lca2014.linux.org.au/wiki/Child_care
First Aid
We have organised and paid for professional St John's Ambulance and First
Aid officers to be at the conference and official social events

Keynotes
Our four confirmed keynote presenters are:
Jonathon Oxer
Jon will be presenting an overview of the latest developments to the
ArduSat project as part of his keynote presentation during
linux.conf.au2014 in Perth, Western Australia.

Jon has been hacking on both hardware and software since he was a little
tacker. Most recently he's been focusing more on the Open Hardware side,
co-founding Freetronics as a direct result of organising the first Arduino
Miniconf at LCA2010. His books include "Ubuntu Hacks" and "Practical
Arduino".

Jon has been variously referred to as Australia's geekiest man and as a
cyborg-in-progress. As part of his “SuperHouse” home automation series, Jon
has taken keyless entry to an all new level by embedding an RFID tag into
his arm using a vet's chipping tool.

Recently he has been working on ArduSat, a satellite that aims to give
hobbyists, students and space enthusiasts an opportunity to design and run
their own experiments in space. By choosing a standardised platform based
on the hugely popular Arduino hardware design, ArduSat allows anyone to
develop and prototype experiments at home using readily accessible parts
and all based on a simple open source software environment.

Kate Chapman
Kate Chapman is the Executive Director of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap
Team.

The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) is an initiative of OpenStreetMap
to apply the principles of open source and open data sharing towards
humanitarian response and economic development.

The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team believes that freely available,
up-to-date geographic data can be vital in responding to a disaster. They
help communities and responders to utilize the OpenStreetMap data, and
encourage them to contribute and update the data.

Over the past two years Kate has been primarily based in Indonesia where
she has lead the AusAID funded HOT program. The program Scenario
Development for Contingency Planning (SD4CP) is a joint initiative of the
Indonesian and Australian governments through BNPB (Indonesian Disaster
Management Agency) and AusAID that aims to teach disaster mangers how to
develop realistic impact scenario for contingency planning. HOT teaches
disaster mangers to spatially analysis the combination of scientific hazard
model outputs with community knowledge through the open-source software
InaSAFE (Indonesia Scenario Assessment For Emergencies). OpenStreetMap is
one of the keys elements of this procedure, as it allows the disaster
mangers to draw on community knowledge to identify important buildings such
as schools and hospitals that potentially be impacted during a disaster.

We're really pleased to have Kate coming to talk with us as her personal
efforts and her teams work represents an organization that we can really
hold up as a shining example of how the open source model truly does work.

Matthew Garret
Matthew is a cloud security developer working at Nebula, a prominent cloud
hardware and services vendor.

Matthew has been hacking on Secure Boot for quite a while, and was deeply
involved with it during his time with RedHat and more recently, with a
broader view of its security implications within the cloud initiative, at
Nebula.

Matthew will be speaking to us about the current state of the debate
concerning Secure Boot, concerns over the security of material held in the
cloud, the influence of the activities of security agencies, and issues
relating to people maintaining traditional freedoms within cloud
environments. These factors are key to the success of the cloud initiative
that has captured the interest of computing communities throughout the
world.

We are really pleased to have Matthew speaking to us about these key topics
that have such an important impact on the success of the cloud computing
initiative.

linux.conf.au is an annual open source conference organised by Linux
Australia. In 2014 the conference will be held in Perth, Western Australia
from the 6th January to the 10th.

Suelette Dreyfus
Dr Suelette Dreyfus wrote the book “Underground”, about early hacker
culture in Australia and overseas. The book, written with Julian Assange,
has now been translated into seven other languages and made into two films.
In the true spirit of open source, she gave away the first edition of
“Underground” to Project Gutenberg.

Her writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Independent (London), The
Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, and The Australian as well as in academic
journals in medicine, health and information systems. She has also authored
or co-authored chapters in a number of books, including forthcoming works
on transparency and on whistle blowing  She's also done more unusual
projects, such as writing “The Idiot Savants' Guide to Rubberhose”.

A Research Fellow at the Department of Computing and Information Systems at
the University of Melbourne, she has been the Principal Researcher on The
World Online Whistle blowing Survey, the first on-line survey that gauges
public attitudes to whistle blowing and has been translated into several
other languages (currently ten).

She currently runs research projects in three areas: e-health, e-education
and the impact of technology on the balance of power between the citizen
and the state with research into whistle-blowing and integrity systems
forming part of the latter area. Before going into academia, Suelette
trained as a cadet and then worked as a staff reporter on the largest
selling newspaper in Australia. She remains active as a journalist.

Mini confs
Each year we try to select a range of topics for our focused mini
conferences. This year's mini conf sessions are listed below.

Monday:
Systems Administration
Developer, Testing, Release and Continuous integration Automation
Open Government
Linux Kernel
Open Radio

Tuesday:
OpenStack
Open Programming
Haecksen
Astronomy
Multimedia and Music
Arduino

Conference
The main conference runs over the remaining three days, and is a full
programme of five streams of deep technical presentations and tutorials
covering a wide range of topics. To view the full schedule please visit our
website at http://lca2014.linux.org.au/programme/schedule.
Conference Location
lca2014 will be held in Perth, Western Australia this year. Perth is
Australia's most remote capital city, but is also where most of the action
is happening. Perth is experiencing an huge amount of growth, driven by the
mining boom, but encompassing all aspects of city life. Perth now has a
vibrant cultural scene, and our outdoor lifestyle and coastal location is
the envy of the world.
The last linux.conf.au held in Perth was ten years ago in 2003, so we are
really looking forward to hosting the conference again.
The linux.conf.au conference is traditionally held on a university campus,
utilising the lecture rooms and accommodation facilities they have to offer
– 2014 is no exception, and we will be hosting the conference at the
University of Western Australia (UWA). The UWA Crawley Campus is situated a
short distance from the Perth CBD and adjacent to the magnificent Swan
river and Kings Park public space.
Accommodation
Accommodation will be at the university colleges  of St George's
http://www.stgeorgescollege.com.au/ and Trinity
http://www.trinity.uwa.edu.au/ for full details of the accommodation please
refer to our wiki article
https://lca2014.linux.org.au/wiki/Campus_accommodation. The accommodation
is ideally situated just across the road from the conference and
registration areas.

Volunteering
The conference is run as a voluntary effort. We rely on people to volunteer
their time to organise and run the conference. During the conference we are
always keen to welcome volunteers to come on board and help with the
running of the conference. Interested people can sign up here
https://lca2014.linux.org.au/wiki/Conference_Volunteers
We offer free registration for people who are willing to volunteer a
significant portion of their time to the conference.

Proposed Focus
To provide a degree of consistency linux.conf.au normally selects a general
focus to help guide the presenters in topic selection. For 2014 our focus
is on “ Linux on the frontier and deep technical content”. With the scope
of Linux broadening at such a rapid pace this provides a broad scope for
speakers topics and allows topics to be drawn from just about any sphere of
computing, be it cybernetics, mobile operating systems, astronomy, big
data, gaming etc.

Contacts
Please send all correspondence to the lca2014 Team
contact at lists.lca2014.linux.org.au
Mailing lists http://lists.lca2014.linux.org.au/mailman/listinfo/
Our website is accessible from http://lca2014.linux.org.au #lca2014
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