Hi all, April was a pretty good month, there was a _lot_ of work put into the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) issue, in terms of submissions, education, publicity and the like. Many thanks to everyone who helped out, and especially to Rusty who put so much work into it, and has managed to speak to _all_ the right people :) If you are one of the (few) unenlightened, please check out http://linux.org.au/fta. It is your future at stake here, and with our government already trying to sell this idea to the US non-believers before listening to us, we have a lot to be concerned about. (http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/05/05/1083635180695.html)
The LA ctte has been able to attend several seminars and symposiums on the FTA to give our point of view, and highlight to dangers present. We have also been speaking to several vendors and government representatives about it, we also have an article in this months IDM magazine. Anyone who hasn't already, for <insert random deity> sake sign the petition :) http://www.petitiononline.com/auftaip/petition.html We have been trying to organise a visit from Lawrence Lessig to further convince our government of the major concerns surrounding Chapter 17 of the FTA. We've managed to convince him to take time out of his busy schedule for a once off appearance directly to our senate, rock on! :) Speaking of news, we have organised training for most of the press team, and several key members of the ctte and community. This is a trial thing, and if successful we may be able to offer this to more community members who have a need for such skills. Basically we are aiming at better arming our spokespeople and writers to come across more professionally and more effectively to our wider audience. This will hopefully help for LCA publicity as well as for issues such as the FTA and other concerns of the community. We have now established several relationships with publications and hope to have regular columns in some of them (details next month! still being finalised) which means a real voice out there. Check out http://linux.conf.au as the LCA2005 team already have put a few details up. They have some pretty kewl ideas and we are really looking forward to supporting them for the next LCA! We have had two grant requests this month, both from Computerbank NSW. Both are still progressing through our grants procedure (described at http://linux.org.au/projects/grants/. Apply for your project/event today!). Computerbank NSW has recently had the good fortune to be given 4000 machines, and we are looking to help them with establishing a way to deal with the machines, so that they can better do their job and distribute these machines to the socio-economically disadvantaged in our community. We strongly support Computerbank and hope that anyone out there with any time might also help them out. It is a good cause, and humbling to realise that the Digital Divide issue is alive and kicking right here at home. We are happy to announce that we are getting back off the ground with our education schemes. We are finalising the LA Education Officer position and will soon announce the lucky vict^H^H^H^Hperson ;) On this note, we are at this point in time the only official LPI Affiliate in Australia, and have not yet really worked with this due to other issues. We hope to strengthen our relationships with LPI and any other certification bodies (such as Red Hat) in order to improve our professionalism and ability as a community. OSEG (http://opensource.org.au/oseg/) had a big win with their advice to ACS (Australian Computer Society). The ACS has taken on our suggestions almost intact and have even backed our advice about the FTA. They will be officially unveiling their Open Source policies May 31st in Canberra. Way to go! We have a new web design, by the wonderful Janet Reid. Check out the icons and penguin tracks at http://www.lucychili.no-ip.org/linuxau/index.shtml. We will be playing with this and have a mock site up soon, then hopefully the entire website should be migrated within a month or two. We have a site-map available at http://linux.org.au/~pia/la-web-structure2.jpg for anyone interested. Warning, it is really big! We had a successful speaker swap with OLS for LCA2004, and will be having a speaker swap with LinuxTag for LCA2005. Way to go Damian Conway who will be enjoying OLS this year! Unfortunately for us, OLS has become a more kernel driven conference and so we decided to tee up with LinuxTag who are more in the same vein for next year. What else? We are organising business cards (finally!) and also hoping to have a sit-down OS demonstration for journalists in Sydney (to start), so anyone interested in helping out please contact me on [EMAIL PROTECTED] (SLUGgers especially! :) I have been invited to speak at the Brazilian International Free Software Conference (http://softwarelivre.org) and will be coming back via New Zealand to visit :) I'll be ear-bashing the government representatives there to find out how they went about their FTA negotiations, and how it affects them considering their postitive approach to open source. Cheers everyone, Pia -- Pia Smith President of Linux Australia [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
