Based on my experiences helping on the Software Freedom Day Melbourne team for several years, and the successful BarCampGeelong, I responded to linux.conf.au’s Call for Papers (CfP) with an outline of a talk around running outstanding events in the free and open source software community. The aim was to provide the skills, resources and techniques that budding organisers would require in order to manage a successful event. Fortunately, the CfP was accepted and as well as being part of the Core Team for linux.conf.au 2012, I had an extra action item – preparing an awesome presentation!

Instead of using Impress for slides, I wanted to find something a little different. At the August WordPress Melbourne meet up, Vernon Fowler used Prezi for his BuddyPress case study. Prezi, while producing impressive slide decks, is proprietary and closed. Something told me this would be unpopular with the linux.conf.au crowd. Having used Inkscape heavily, I was directed to Sozi, a free and open source software tool that creates SVG files and Javascript from Inkscape. This tool is amazing – as you’ll be able to see from the slide deck below. The only drawback I found was afterwards – when trying to upload the Sozi-created SVG file to MediaWiki, it’s detected as a potentially dangerous file because the SVG contains HTML.

After delivering the presentation (link to video below), I received lots of constructive feedback. In particular, Karen Sandler, one of our keynotes for linux.conf.au, let me know that she doesn’t use the camera on her smartphone – because it uses proprietary software. Of course, this meant that all the QR codes I’d included in the slides were effectively useless! So, the slide deck below has been updated with printed URLs.

One of the more positive pieces of feedback received was around the fact I produced and printed a transcript for the presentation so hearing impaired people at the presentation could have a more equivalent experience.

• Slide deck done in Inkscape and Sozi (SVG, 25Mb – this will take a while to load. View in SVG compliant browser such as Firefox)
• Video of presentation at linux.conf.au 2012 (Youtube video, approx 44 minutes)
• best-event-transcript-16Jan12 (ODT Open Office text format, 25Kb)
• best-event-transcript-16Jan12 (DOC Microsoft Word, 77Kb)

My last post outlined plans for the next StixCamp… unfortunately, due to a number of reasons, we’ve had to postpone this event – to give us time to plan, find sponsors and generally bring together an awesome BarCamp. Stay tuned for more information!

The inaugural StixCamp was held at Newstead, central Victoria in March 2009. Based on the success of this event, it will be run again over the ANZAC day long weekend, 24-26th April, with thanks to our hosts Ron and Julia from Welshmens Reef Vineyard. The feedback from the last event suggested that we needed to get the word out about the event a lot earlier – so we’re trying to spread the word! In case you’re in doubt about how awesome StixCamp was, you can check out some of these great photos

If we can better promote StixCamp Newstead 2010 then we’d love to hear from you! Just let us know at

organisers at barcampmelbourne dot org

(In case you didn’t know, StixCamp is run in BarCamp style and was started by the crew who’ve helped put together BarCampMelbourne)

In particular, we’d love to know;

• Where would you expect to hear about this event?
• What mailing lists are you already on?
• What user groups are you a member of?
• Where did you hear about your first BarCamp Melbourne or StixCamp?
• If you work for an IT organisation or study at a university, what’ s the best way for us to spread the word?

We’d warmly welcome any other ideas you might have, and if you’d like to get involved, just send a blank email to;

organisers-join@barcampmelbourne.org

You can also follow us @StixCampVicAu on Twitter/Identi.ca or @BarCampMelb for more information.