‘Til All Are One

The Linux Australia Council elections are in full swing, and I thought it only fair to abuse my blog to pimp my candidacy for an Ordinary Committee Member position. You’re an LA member (it’s free!), drop in and exercise your democratic right (i.e. vote for me :p ).

My official platform is as follows:

I have been participating in the FOSS community for over ten years. I have managed Linux Australia’s presences at CeBIT and the Education Expo. I have also represented LA at other events such as the Moodle Conference in 2006, and was the lead video encoder at the A/V Team at linux.conf.au 2007.

For the past two years I have been serving on the SLUG Committee (including one term as President), organising most of its meetings in that time and running events like Software Freedom Day.

A key focus of my efforts in the community over the past few years has been to foster co-operation between groups and contributors. As an Linux Australia Council member, I feel that I would be even more effective in this endeavour.

The wonderful thing about free software code development is that it can scale so well. I would like to see a similar level of scalability with the wider community outside of the coding realm. LA is uniquely positioned to provide the resources and support to enable community members and groups to achieve great things. The benefits of this are many-fold:

• it makes it easier to engage, hence breaking down separations between contributors and users;
• it grows the community of contributors;
• it allows us to do more and better things on the whole; and
• it aids to reduce dependence on a small group of actors, thereby addressing the ever-present danger of burn-out amongst contributors.

We must remember, however, that the ‘community’ is much larger than the membership of LA and LUGs. I have come across many people who are interested in some aspect of ‘Linux’ or ‘open source’ but know very little about LA or their local LUG. In many cases, their interests are more directly served by other groups, such as:

• industry associations (e.g. OSIA)
• language groups (Java, Python, etc.)
• other operating systems groups (OpenSolaris, Mac OS, etc.)
• standards bodies (IEEE, W3C, etc.)
• computer clubs
• groups devoted to a field (education, embedded, etc.)

LA has a fantastic community, but in the grand scheme of things it is but one of many. I hope - in an official Linux Australia capacity - to improve networking with these other organisations to grow the overall community and extend the reach of free and open source software to more sectors of society.