OWOOT and member news

The first round of talks have been confirmed for the Haecksen miniconf at linux.conf.au 2013. The current talks are:

10:40: Skye Croeser: Feminism, anarchism and FOSS
11:05: Denise Paolucci: overcoming impostor syndrome
11:30: break
11:40: unannounced
12:05: Joh Pirie-Clark Security
12:30: lunch
1:20: Kathy Reid Less flack, moar hack!
1:45: Fee Plumley: Open Source Cities
2:10: break
2:20: Ruth Ellison: Recipe for making geek jewellery
2:45: Katie Miller Educating Girls about FOSS
3:00: afternoon tea
3:40: Jacinta Richardson : writing a good abstract/getting your talk accepted at a conference

Today linux.conf.au 2013, to be held in Canberra in January, announced five additional miniconferences. This includes the Haecksen miniconf for women in open technology, run by OWOOT volunteers each year:

Haecksen: This miniconference is designed to encompass the wide range of activities that women are involved in throughout open source, and has historically attracted women involved in areas as diverse as software development, hardware hacking, and smart crafting, along with a wide array of other disciplines within free and open source software.

OWOOT member Silvia Pfeiffer has been appointed as part of the editorial team of the W3C HTML5 specification.

She writes:

[W]hen invited, I decided to offer my spare time to the W3C.

Software engineer and self-proclaimed “geek” Brenda Wallace has been elected as the latest new member of InternetNZ’s ruling council. She will serve a three-year term.

Wallace is currently a production engineer at Weta Digital. She describes her role thus: “I build, glue and duct-tape the stuff that goes between giant and/or archaic systems and make them play nicely with each other - and then sometimes I get to replace giant archaic systems with lightweight small systems that do the job even better.”

ComputerWorld: New councillor, two fellows created at InternetNZ AGM

Congratulations Brenda!

OWOOT member Donna Benjamin will be doing an interview with Melbourne's RRR community radio station at 10:40am today (March 27) Melbourne time (March 26, 2340 UTC).

You can listen on the live stream, or, if local to Melbourne, on 102.7FM.

Happy International Women's Day! To celebrate, the National Library of Australia has announced that their Trove collection of digitised Australian newspapers and periodicals now contains The Dawn: a Journal for Australian Women, an early Australian feminist journal, published by Louisa Lawson from 1888 to 1905.

View and read the digitised version of The Dawn at Trove.

The project to raise money to Digitise the Dawn was conceived and run by Donna Benjamin in 2011. Thanks Donna!

From 2:20pm at the Haecksen miniconf at linux.conf.au on Monday January 16, Valerie Aurora will be running a workshop especially for our male allies. Please personally invite the men you know to come along and have some fun with us. They will find out why we want and need allies, and what to do when they find themselves in an awkward situation. Val will run through some specific scenarios that we've all seen, and how they can play out differently when there is an ally involved.

Register your interest in attending the allies workshop at the Haecksen website.

The Haecksen miniconf @ linux.conf.au schedule has been announced!

Schedule

The miniconf will be on Monday Jan 16 in Ballarat. It includes talks by Sara Falamaki, Valerie Aurora, Mary Gardiner and Sarah Novotny, and a panel including Pia Waugh, Selena Deckelmann, Leslie Hawthorn and Danni Madeley.

See the full schedule for more information.

Attending

The miniconf is open to those registered to attend linux.conf.au. See registration information and prices.

Thanks

Thanks to Lana Brindley, the organiser of the Haecksen miniconf in 2012.

OWOOT member Alice Boxhall is one of the Google engineers featured in From the desert to the sea: Google Voice Search experiments, using Google Voice Search underwater.

Each year, the group that is now OWOOT runs a one-day miniconference, called Haecksen, at the linux.conf.au conference. In January 2012 linux.conf.au will be held in Ballarat and the Haecksen miniconference will be held on Monday 16th January.

If you want to attend, you need to be attending linux.conf.au, which doesn't have single-day registration. Their registration is open and early bird prices are available until Oct 31 or until sold out, whichever happens first.

Volunteer registration is also now open.