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Australia/NZ Linux Meetings

I am going to start a new Linux focused FOSS online meeting for people in Australia and nearby areas. People can join from anywhere but the aim will be to support people in nearby areas.

To cover the time zone range for Australia this requires a meeting on a weekend, I’m thinking of the first […]

Happiness and Lecture Questions

I just attended a lecture about happiness comparing Australia and India at the Australia India Institute [1]. The lecture was interesting but the “questions” were so bad that it makes a good case for entirely banning questions from public lectures. Based on this and other lectures I’ve attended I’ve written a document about how to […]

Phone Based Lectures

Early this month at a LUV meeting I gave a talk with only my mobile phone to store notes. I used Google Keep to write the notes as it’s one of the easiest ways of writing a note on a PC and quickly transferring it to a phone – if I keep doing this I […]

Length of Conference Questions

After LCA last year I wrote about “speaking stacks” and conference questions [1]. In that post I did some rough calculations on the amount of conference time taken by questions and determined that anyone who asks one question per day at a conference such as LCA (with about 600 delegates) is going to be asking […]

Speaking Stacks

Brianna Laugher wrote a blog post about the speaking stack used in the free software activism BoF at LCA 2013 [1].

Occupy Wall St uses what they call a progressive speaking stack – this means that white men step back in the queue and people from marginalised groups step forward [2].

During the free software […]

Globalisation and Phone Calls

I just watched an interesting TED talk by Pankaj Ghemawat (of which the most important points are summarised in a TED blog post) about the world not being as globalised as people expect [1]. One point is that only 2% of traditional voice phone calling minutes (and ~6% when you include VOIP) are for international […]

Web Video, Global Innovation, and Free Software

Web Video and Global Innovation

Chris Anderson (the curator of TED) gave an insightful TED talk about Web Video and Global Innovation [1]. Probably most people who have used the Internet seriously have an intuitive knowledge of the basic points of this talk, Chris had the insight to package it together in a clear manner.

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Pre-Meeting Lightning Talks

This evening I arrived at the LUV [1] meeting half an hour before it started. I was one of about a dozen people sitting in the room waiting, some of us had laptops and were reading email but others just sat quietly – the venue is sometimes open as much as an hour before the […]

Creating a Micro Conference

The TEDxVolcano

The TED conference franchise has been extended to TEDxVolcano [1], this is a small conference that features people who are stranded by the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland. As usual TED is an inspiration to us all, so there is obvious potential for other conferences to be organised in similar situations – there’s no […]

Respecting the Audience

Currently there is an ongoing debate about a joke that was made during a lecture about free software. I have previously written about why I think it’s inappropriate with regard to children in the audience [1]. For those who are interested in following this mess Matthew Garrett has written an interesting follow-up post with some […]