LCA Open Day

Event: Open Day at linux.conf.au
See lca and lca Open Day

Organizers

 * Tim Bowden (Event Owner)
 * Cameron Shorter
 * Milton Lofberg
 * Pieter Steetsel

Venue
University New South Wales

See lca open day

Thurs 18th Jan 2007, 3pm to 8pm

Setup
From lca organisers:

Dear Open Day exhibitor,

Firstly, many thanks for offering to have a demo stand at the Open Day event at linux.conf.au 2007. This email covers the details of what you'll have access to, when to set up, the timetable and a few other details you'll need. We currently have 200 people registered to come, plus about half the conference attendees (~350) so it should be a fairly busy and bustling event.

Please confirm your participation! Also, please get back to me asap if you have any questions so we can sort them out in time. I want to publish all the details on the website by the 14th.

Timetable:


 * 9am - Furniture layout and check of electricity - Open Day organisers only
 * 12pm - 2pm - setup for Open Day - that means all you. If you need more than
 * 2 hours to setup, please let me know.
 * 3pm Open Day starts
 * 6pm Food is served - one pie and drink per person (and extra for sale)
 * 7pm Prizes, announcements, some last talks
 * 8pm Open Day close

You'll all be expected to organise your own posters (max 1m X 1m), volunteers (do not leave your stands unaccompanied during the entire event please), and of course your own demos. You will have either one or two power points, so please bring a power board or double adaptor if you need it.

I also strongly recommend you do some printouts or have some CDs to give away if you can, as it will hopefully encourage people to participate in your project. The whole point of this event, apart from showing off some really exciting technologies and projects, is to get the visitors excited about Open Source, and hopefully have them go home keen to play with some new stuff. The more information you can make available the better. I suggest having about 400 printouts about your project and where people can get more information and get involved (plain A4 is fine).

There will be rotating talks throughout the event, short 10 minute talks by some of you. Please let me know if you want to be added or removed from the list of confirmed short talks. There will be set up either a projector or a large screen for slides/video and some limited seating for the talks. The idea is the stage area will only seat about 50 people so those interested in your session can sit or stand there for it, but we keep people moving so they see all the demos.

Confirmed talks

 * Changing the world with OLPC - Chris Blizzard
 * Virtual reality showcase - Wayne Piekarski
 * Digital graphics showcase - Andy Fitzsimon
 * Home made rockets (of the flying variety) - Bdale Garbee & Keith Packard
 * Making a podcast with FOSS - Jono and James
 * John Stowers and Hugo Vincent - make your own plane at home
 * LoCo Teams - Crazy about Ubuntu - Melissa Draper
 * Open Source Gaming - Tim Ansell
 * Digital music and Open Source - Denis Crowdy

Also, please let me know if the names of your demo below is correct:

There are currently around 35 exhibitors, and a map of the exhibitors is attached. The light orange stands are community tables, the red ones are sponsors, and the large spaces are demos for special exhibitors.


 * 1) - Wayne Piekarski - Virtual Reality demo (RECONFIRMED)
 * 2) - NICTA
 * 3) - HP
 * 4) - PS3 - the first in Australia! - IBM
 * 5) - NICTA
 * 6) - NICTA
 * 7) - NICTA
 * 8) - NICTA
 * 9) - NICTA
 * 10) - Digital Audio display - Denis Crowdy (RECONFIRMED)
 * 11) - Open Source & Gaming - Tim Ansell (RECONFIRMED)
 * 12) - Open Source & Gaming (DDR mats) - Tim Ansell (RECONFIRMED)
 * 13) - Digital graphics showcase - Andy Fitzsimon
 * 14) - Open Source & Gaming - Tim Ansell (RECONFIRMED)
 * 15) - GP2X gaming console demos - Doug Warouw (part of gaming miniconf) (RECONFIRMED)
 * 16) - Blender 3D - Make your own animations! - Matt Ebb
 * 17) - Wesnoth gaming booth - Rusty Russell (RECONFIRMED)
 * 18) - OLPC talk and demo - Chris Blizzard
 * 19) - Constellation  - Rachel and Jeremy Fitzhardinge -(needs dark area) http://www.goop.org/constellation/

20 - 25 - Sponsors, confirming


 * 1) - Open Office - Jim Watson  (RECONFIRMED)
 * 2) - Albatross: Open UAV Project - Hugo Vincent & John Stowers (RECONFIRMED)
 * 3) - Podcasting for everyone - James Purser (RECONFIRMED)
 * 4) - MythTV demo - Mikal Still
 * 5) - Embedded Open Source demo - Mark Phillips (RECONFIRMED)
 * 6) - OSGeo - Tim Bowden
 * 7) - Debian booth - anibal to confirm who
 * 8) - Ubuntu and Ubuntu-Au - Melissa Draper (needs 3 tables for 3 computers) (RECONFIRMED)
 * 9) - Ubuntu and Ubuntu-Au - Melissa Draper (RECONFIRMED)
 * 10) - RepRap http://reprap.org/ - Vik Olliver (RECONFIRMED)
 * 11) - Home made rockets and satellites - Bdale Garbee & Keith Packard (RECONFIRMED)
 * 12) - Linux Australia - Jonathon Oxer
 * 13) - The Sydney Linux User Group - Ken Wilson
 * 14) - Open Source Segway - Geoffrey Bennett (RECONFIRMED)

Demos
MapGuide OS- Milton GeoServer- Cameron OGC/SLIP- Tim

Promotion
We need to give GIS people a reason to come to the LCA open day. We don't have much time, so we should get the word out to all the GIS news sites and blogs

Blogs we should aim at getting a mention on

 * http://chris.narx.net/ (Chris Tweedie)
 * http://spatialguru.com/ (Tyler Mitchell)
 * http://weblogs.java.net/blog/jive/ (Jody Garnet)
 * http://geospatial.blogs.com/ (Geoff Zeiss)
 * http://www.spatiallyadjusted.com/ (James Fee)
 * http://www.reprojected.com/geoblog/ (Aaron Racicot)
 * Lots more. Does visicom have a list of OSGeo friendly blogs for promotions purposes?

Outcome

 * Some random thoughts about my (Tim Bowden) experience at the lca open day:
 * Lots of questions about data availability. It's a hot issue.  It was almost always the first question asked, and everybody asked it.  We need to get people thinking about this issue at a higher level.
 * Lots of education type enquiries (not surprising given the uni environment), from spatial science and social science people. Would be good if we could point to some resources such as success stories, projects for labs etc.
 * What can I replace X with? We need an 'equivalence' diagram (even though it's never a perfect fit).
 * Broader geofoss stack diagram. What are all the pieces, where do they fit (Data store (PostGIS, mySQL), data manipulation libs (proj, gdal/ogr etc), data serving components (mapserver, mapguide, geoserver etc), desktop heavy duty to lightweight (grass to udig etc)
 * Case studies page; Who's using GeoFOSS in productive environments (Like the list refractions collects for PostGIS?)
 * We need a brochure for PostGIS; It's an important part of the stack that people are interested in.
 * About 700 people through the doors; Lots of tyre kickers, but some solid interest as well, mostly from govt departments and some developers.