Posted on September 27th, 2009
Software Freedom Day 2009 was held at the Melbourne PC User Group rooms at Chadstone shopping centre on 19th September 09. Organised by Brianna Laugher, President of WikiMedia Australia, and Donna Benjamin, President of Linux Users’ Victoria, the event aimed to showcase the numerous free and open source software and hardware tools available for use.
The day saw numerous presentations, including;
- Wen Lin presented on how to use alternative operating systems such as Ubuntu on your netbook, and how to use Clonezilla for backup up and restoring your system
- Ben Sturmfels presented on the basic freedoms that open source software embodies
- Simon Hobbs provided an overview of using Drupal for building websites
- Minh Nguyen presented on programming with Python
- Daniel Jitnah presented on how to make the move to open source
During the day Andy Gelme, who’s heavily into open hardware and is involved with the Community Connected Hackerspace in Melbourne gave an hour and a half workshop on Arduinos, where we all got to program an Arduino. This was much easier than I had anticipated, as it only required a bsic knowledge of electronics, and some experience in C.
I ran two workshops during the day on WordPress;
A very big thank you to Multimedia Victoria, who generously supported the event, allowing hundreds of Open CDs containing free and open source software to be produced and distrubted.
Posted on October 18th, 2008
Further to this post, the presentation I gave at Software Freedom Day in Melbourne is now available. It is a brief presentation, as most of it was demonstrating WordPress and Alice. Unfortunately I had a few hiccups on the day, and it was only with the much appreciated assistance of Ben Balbo and others that the presentation could go ahead. You see, Sakai runs on a Tomcat installation and I had it set up ready to go, but had to reboot, then had Java issues so I couldn’t get it to work. The other hampering factor was that external internet access was not available, and most of my demo used online websites. Never mind, there’s always next year.
It was great to see so many presenters and participants, however numbers were down compared to last year. The Hub, while being a great venue, is a little bit out of the way for most – not as central as the Town Hall.
Free and open source tools in education (Powerpoint, 107kb)
Links for the tools referenced are given below;
Questions and comments are warmly welcomed.
Posted on September 13th, 2008
Peter Baker and Donna Benjamin (with only a little bit of help from me I have to admit) have been hard at work putting the finishing touches on the preparations for Software Freedom Day in Melbourne. We have a great venue this year – The Hub at Docklands – and have an array (no pun intended) of great speakers lined up, including;
I’m actually quite excited by what is in store on Saturday – with most of the Pub Standards / Linux Users of Victoria people in attendance. There is just so much value in FOSS that non profits, community organisations and educational institutions can benefit from.
