Conference Complete

Hypothetical: You have 500 hours of free time. What would you do?

a) Indulge in the biggest beer-fueled, pizza-muching, TV-watching extravanganza of all time,
b) Do the 101 odd jobs you'd told yourself you'd always do,
c) Climb some distant mountain so a guru could tell you you'd left your enlightenment at the base-camp, or
d) Volunteer to run a two day linux/open source government for Politicians, Public Servants, and business keen on seeing F/OSS succeed

Well, I ended up doing d! (You'll note I didn't say "choose". Choice played little part ... I must "thank" Stilly for that later)

Open Computing in Government 2005 has been my hobby for the past six months, and it's finally happened. Two days of stuff all to do with getting the Australian Government into the groove of OSS. And with some success.

Our crowd this year was a little smaller than last year, but of the dozens of feedback forms I've read tonight all indicate everyone was impressed by the Speakers (thanks to this fantastic group of people), the troops from AGIMO (thanks John Grant, Colin Thomas, David Mackey, Katie-Jane Lubiewesky, Eric Davis) and even the two Senators who turned up.

I won't rehash everything that happened, but it's good to know people noticed. We got some press here ...

Agencies get open source push

and here ...

Fed guide fosters penguin power

And in all of these places!

Open source 'war of words' intensifies
Feds stomp on Red Hat
Aussie lawyer wants 'clearer' GPL
Favour us over proprietary software: OSS advocates
Microsoft cops standards attack
Government agencies lagging on OSS: Red Hat
Ignore 'fads' when examining OSS: Govt
Govts on path to 'demystify' open source procurement

Stilly even tried to claim press about OCG ( Govt unwraps open source guide) as press about lca ... fat chance Stilly, get your own press :-)

I'm too exhausted to give too many highlights ... perhaps the best was Paul from Novell, who followed the guy from Microsoft (yeah, MS talking open source ... NOT!). The best use of joke BSOD screens I've seen in a while.