[Music]
good afternoon everybody and welcome
back for the 3 45 sydney time session
which is what does linux australia do
all year and i'm guessing the question
after this when we're not at lca so i'm
going to hand over to julian and sarah
who's going to run this afternoon is a
bit of an interactive session we won't
be taking questions during the session
but we will be taking questions
afterwards over in the channels so if
you haven't found the channels they're
on the left hand side drop the channel
button down and the one you want to
search for is the linux australia
discussion channel and that's where
you'll find what's going on
also called the big blue button room but
uh you won't find that written on the
screen which had me confused trivit so
over to sarah and julian thank you
hello
welcome everyone
uh i'm julian i was the secretary of
linux australia in 2019-2020
i was also part of the team for lca 2008
and a couple of years on the linux user
victoria committee as well
and i'm sarah jermaine i'm the now
ex-president of linux australia just
retired um i've been on councils for
eight years now and i hold the record
sorry josh i now hold the record um and
i've also organized several conferences
several lcas um 2012 in ballarat 2016 in
geelong and 2021 and 22 online
next
all right so linux australia is the
parent organization for
linuxconfigurepikenau as well as a few
other conferences events and user groups
it handles the being a company items for
these groups it turns out if you're
running a large event
venues expect to deal with the company
av companies expect to deal with a
company etc
uh linux australia for these events is
that company and it also provides
continuity for those events so it's not
a complete fresh start for every event
our membership is the registered voting
members those of you who have joined at
links or gayu membership or
previous
uh urls
through past systems but we do consider
our
attendees at conferences our members of
lugs the meet up groups
we support the subcommittees we support
as non-voting stakeholders all of you
watching this talk are our stakeholders
of linux australia
so
the history of lending australia is that
in 1999 rusty hosted calu the conference
for australian linux users in melbourne
and it was bankrolled off his personal
amex
in 2001 the first linux confereu as we
call it today was held in sydney and
linux australia was credited to handle
the profit that that event raised
rusty gave a keynote at lca 2019 about
lca history highly encouraged if you
want to know more about that
or to see rusty dressed in
silly costumes
more recently pike on a you
are now very much a major second
conference for linux australia started
in 2010
and in 2011
uh
more formal ownership with some of the
lugs as slug was
at least the process was started to wind
slugging and other logs have gone
the same way as well
i wrote this diagram up this morning
because apparently that's the sort of
thing i do
to show
that we've had a lot of people come
through an extra council over these
we've had 63 unit council members uh the
longest serving
ordered by their first year on council
stuart smith hube lemmings josh hesketh
sarah and russell stewart
of those i've had the pleasure to serve
with three of them and
have met the other two
i want to call out that
we do have change in membership but we
also have some long-standing tenures and
that's really great
you see
with some community groups that it is
the same people for 20 years or more
or
they can never get people to stay for
two years
so that australia has a really great
mid
midway it'd be nice perhaps if some
people stayed longer be nice perhaps if
we got more views
it's hard to say which is better
and
if you want to look at actual this data
in readable form and not blur of pixels
the information is available on the
website we may put this rendering up
we may not don't know
all right so what does linux australia
actually do
take it away
thank you julian um so this image might
be a little bit blurry there's a lot
going on here but
um
the council this year well sorry
last year decided to go through and sort
of document every single piece
of the puzzle that we sort of cover
across
um our community and what we do for
various groups including the lugs and
other subcommittees that we do have
um
these tend to fall on the seven council
members that are on council um there are
subcommittees obviously so we've got
things like the admin team um
and our event committees but generally
we cover all of these areas
if i can go to the next slide please
uh so
firstly i'll take you through the
governance piece now this is the piece
that we have to do regardless um we have
to make sure that we've got compliance
with the new south wales government
because we're actually incorporated in
new south wales so it means that we're
bound by the new south wales
incorporated associations act so we have
to make sure that we've got a
constitution we do all our annual
reporting so
some of you may have received the annual
report the other day
we've got
council meetings that we have to make
sure that we minute and publish and we
do choose to publish it um openly for
everyone to see there's obviously some
things that we don't share but
most things are all on the website there
for you to look at
we have to make sure that we have a
council of some sort and make sure that
we have elections and a register of
members
we have to keep these ticking along just
so that if we get pulled up on
compliance issues or anything like that
by the new south wales government
we can we can show what we need to do
um
so like i said we have to keep minutes
attendance sheets for you know how many
times a council member has been to
meetings because we do meet once a
fortnight um and we're bound by a
constitution
so we have to make sure we follow the
rules of the constitution as well
we also have to run agms which we just
had one yesterday
so as you can see just in this section
alone
we are doing a lot of administrative
work and this is just a small section of
it
now the insurance piece which i haven't
talked about yet is the interesting one
the organization
has grown with its requirements so we're
running more conferences we're doing
more things online we're doing advocacy
work
so
we have the standard public liability
insurance
we've got directors insurance and also
we've got things like volunteer
insurance because we have hundreds of
volunteers each each year with our
events alone
and we also provide insurance for our
linux users groups as well so if they
want to hire a hall they can use our
insurance
use that hall
and that's totally covered by us we also
cover all the legal fees if there's any
legal issues
and
interestingly the more and more that we
move online especially with our events
we now have to even consider things like
cyber insurance
uh i might go to the next slide please
this is also
another big piece is the finances um
linux australia turns over previous well
pre-rona
um
we
turn over about a million dollars a year
and that's just from all of our
conferences
and this year alone that we've turned
over 270 000 so there has been a steep
drop but that's because we have a lot
less events going on
uh at treasurer russell stewart he's a
whiz with the numbers but he has to
manage 19 australian bank accounts
three new zealand bank accounts four
paypal accounts six stripe accounts and
one transfer wise account
now
that's just in one year alone but in a
regular year that's not a co-video when
we're doing face-to-face events
that he's probably interacting with 11
or 12 budgets because we've got all
these events plus the linux australia
budget
10 different treasurers
and so much access and permissions to
all of those bank accounts and all of
those stripe accounts
everything and
it's a lot of hours just sitting there
trying to manage all of those those
permissions but we also physically spend
a lot of hours at westpac um sorry
westpac but
our record at the moment is we've spent
six hours in at the gold coast um trying
to just make sure that we've got the
right people authorizing the right
accounts um you know
and taking people off and putting people
back on making sure that people are
physically there to sign for it set up
you know
customer accounts all that sort of thing
and so
to add to that unfortunately council
tends to miss a lot of lca because we're
doing a lot of the administrivia work in
the background
next slide please
so this one
we do a lot of communications work as
well and whilst it does seem like we do
a lot of we don't do a lot of uh work
during the year except during lca we
actually
help with a lot of the social media we
manage all of the mailing lists all of
the chat platforms so we've got uh the
matrix channel and libero chat channels
uh we also have rocket chat now for lca
we manage all of the
newsletters blogs websites annual
reports communications policies
we've got official media teams and we've
also got an admin team and a mirror team
next slide please
just call out the admin team again they
do
as much work as we say as council does
the admin team
does a similar amount
uh there is
more infrastructure than you would
believe behind this stuff
and
some of it's been cloud hosted and some
of it's actually coming back from being
cloud hosted
because cloud hosting is not a magic way
to be for it to be cheaper it turns out
no definitely not that admin team to a
tremendous work
uh mirror team a little even more behind
the scenes because this is the magic
stuff that your free software depends on
for distribution
and
that has changed a little bit in recent
years as cdns have become more widely
distributed
but having those solid mirrors in
australia has been extremely helpful
uh the next piece is around membership
grants and awards uh so we have on
on our register about five and a half
thousand members
which is a lot of people to make sure
that we have um on our system and we can
communicate with if we need to
um we are running a civic crm instance
on wordpress so it um we've since moved
from memberdb if you'll remember
memberdb
um
and
it allows us to run things like our
elections every year so linux australia
funded a specific elections piece for
civi crm and it's actually now used
quite widely around the world and it's
become um
you know quite important piece for civic
crm
we also offer a grants program now the
grants program each year we probably
go about 15 to 25k a year um
and this is all the profits that we've
made from the conference go straight
back into the community so if you've got
a project that you want to um
you know spin up
we will provide funds to be able to
um
to support that we can also provide
continuing funds if need be um and in
the past we've also provided um tickets
to go to various events so it might be
lca it might be drupalcon it might be
um drupalgov any of those sort of things
so we've also got some awards and we've
got the rusty wrench which um is usually
given out every year and it's um
for people that um are in line with our
values and it's named after rusty
russell
we've also got some other awards that we
do give out every once in a while and
it's our community awards so last year
we gave the community award to the
covert safe team
for their advocacy work
to make sure that the code was made
public for the covert safe app
we also have things like we have to
maintain membership policies we also
provide community uh sponsorships as
well so we have some organizations that
um approach us for scholarships
uh so for example um there is a library
organization called vala and we provide
um
uh diversity scholarships to allow for
librarians to attend uh vala's tech camp
uh we also provide scholarships to be
able to attend
um the net thing internet governance
forum that happens every year and this
forum specifically um we make sure that
the scholarships don't just go to free
tickets but it actually goes to things
like child care
food for the day
travel all that sort of thing to make
sure that people can get access
to these wonderful conferences
fix please
and the next one is it kind of goes into
two pieces there's outreach and advocacy
um and in outreach
uh we have a lot of subcommittees so we
have open source australia drupal joomla
australia uh the admin team the mirror
team linux uses victoria we have a media
and comms team
we also have um a lot of
groups that are in the peripheral as
well so we've got like groups like
humbug in queensland that use our
infrastructure so we need to actually
maintain a lot of those subcommittees
and liaise with them
and work with them to
make their experiences and their
interactions with their community
easier to do
so for example with i just realized
we've missed out the wordpress community
but we look after all of their meetup
accounts for example so we pay for all
of that
um so all they have to do is just run
the event they don't have to think about
the administrative side
to that the new thing that's come along
is the employee assistance program
um which is um it might be some people
might be familiar there's a lot of
organizations that have it it's actually
a support program for volunteers
um and it will be actually made widely
available to all of our volunteers
across linux australia and its
subcommittees so if there's any issues
that you might have
um or if you're going through some stuff
you can call up this
unbiased
group and they'll leave everything
anonymous and you can call them and get
support through them they also offer
things like
job
advice if you want to go for a new job
so they'll even go through your resume
for you so it offers a huge amount of
stuff
the other thing is that we obviously
look after the code of conduct as well
so when you came to this conference um
you signed up to the code of conduct and
if there's any issues that may come up
during the conference it gets escalated
to council
um there's sorry julian i was just going
to say it
in our larger events there's often an
event code of conduct group
where
they have issues or they further
escalation is desired council can then
handle from there
and that also applies to cases where
with an events code of conduct
if an incident was to happen with an
organizer of an event as well
and so on the other side we do
some advocacy work unfortunately we
don't do as much as we would like to
obviously given the rest of the stuff
that we actually we also do
but we also partner with organizations
like digital rights watch uh we
partnered with sula dreyfus last year in
signing um the
the letter to ask for the code to be
made public
um and we have done some public
responses in the past as well um it
really depends on um volunteer effort
when it comes to this sort of piece so
if you um
would like support in putting together
public responses or
you know government responses to
anything please do ask us
for any help whatsoever because
we will put our
support behind it
uh next slide please
and the last piece is our events now
this is probably our biggest piece even
though the rest seems
quite big in itself um we have all our
event liaisons um this year has been a
lot easier because obviously there's a
few council members on um
the lca event we've got some members on
pycon as well and we've got some
other council members in different areas
so event liaisons we just make sure that
everything's okay um we also send linux
australia representatives to the
conferences so we can act as a support
for the core teams
the other thing that we do is we um with
all these events that we run so we run
lca pike on a you drupal south joomla
day word camp health hack
um if you're actually interested in
running one please do get in contact
with us because
we are
interested in supporting more
communities as well
we used to previously also support
govhack
and it's actually a bit of a success
story for us in the way that
govhack grew to such an extent that they
were able to go out and form their own
organization as well so we actually
provided um the infrastructure to start
with as they were growing up
um
we also i also wanted to call out um
that we've got a ghosts um
community which
um is all of the organization uh
organizers from conferences past
and all these people provide their
advice their wisdom
they're
just doing things absolutely wrong kind
of situa wisdom for us
and
they're just a good helping hand at all
of these conferences so you'll look in
the regio desk for example it's not just
the core team or the volunteers
responding to things it's actually those
who have turned up to conferences in the
past or run a conference in the past
and you know it's just a lovely
community and we'd like to help keep
that going
might go to the next slide please
so what can you get from linux australia
okay
julian
yeah so
as you mentioned if you've got
a conference you would like to see an
event you would like to see ideally that
you would like to help make happen but
if you think there's a community out
there within linux australia's general
open source
uh community
category
uh
do contact council to see
if it makes sense and it might not
but we do have those contacts we've got
those people we know
who have run events who might be willing
to give you advice who might
have connections to related groups
because
maybe your event isn't quite big enough
to justify pulling off
but
maybe we can collect two or three of
those groups and have an event
as a trial
uh this also
could then become an ongoing
subcommittee as
some of our events are
and
yeah
um i think the other thing to sorry
congratulations
historically these have been in-person
events
we
would absolutely
be open to
certainly giving assistance and pointers
and helpers on
virtual events
as you may have seen if you watched
ryan's talk yesterday there is a
surprisingly large amount behind pulling
off
uh lca
and
pycon using that the venulis system it
looks
slick and wonderful and automated
and there's a lot more automation than
there was 15 years ago last time i had
to
deal with it but
it's still a tremendous amount of work
but maybe sitting on zoom for a day it's
not
a wonderful experience by comparison
but it might get you started and we can
help with that
i think the other thing to add to that
is we've also just started up the open
source australia subcommittee um we've
had a lot of groups in the past approach
us
um they're a little bit funny because
they said to us all but we're not we
don't have anything to do with linux but
we've got heaps to do with open source
um so what we've actually done is start
up the open source australia
subcommittee so that if there is an
issue with the linkage with linux
australia you'll still get the benefits
that linux australia can provide but
open source australia can provide
um
that same support
the other thing is that i just wanted to
do a shout out to all of the previous
organizers and the current organizers of
lca and all of the events that we do run
there is so many hours of work that goes
into running these events even running
an online event it's not easy
it makes us nervous when tickets are
bought last minute
because we're worried about the numbers
but it's
you
you turning up to these conferences help
linux australia keep going forward and
it helps us provide these grants
programs
and so
having these people organize these
conferences is you know a lot of hours
work and dedication so we do thank
the conference organizers
next slide
so as mentioned earlier
for around linux strays roommate we will
absolutely endorse advocacy if there are
uh issues and such
to
where linux australia's voice can be
helpful
in the past linux australia has
um
used that voice quite
widely
more recently we've tried to be a bit
more selective and
there are
uh
issues that
everyone on linux australia council is
completely behind that we know our
membership is completely behind
but they're not within our remit and
we have learnt from experience that
as true as it might be as much as we
want to endorse
it's not actually helpful
either in the specific situation or
for linux australia using our voice
later on for
issues much closer to our
areas
so we do try and keep the advocacy
clearly related
definitely
and now
so i can take this [ __ ]
so how can you help linux australia so
slide please
what um
as we mentioned we are um well we may
not have ventured we're a 100 volunteer
run organization we don't um pay for any
of our roles um we're just doing it out
of the pure love of open source and
linux australia so what we would love
for you to do is advocate with us
run an event if you're interested and
we're happy to support any event that is
in line with our values
join one of our subcommittees as so many
subcommittees that would love some help
with especially in media and com so if
you're good with the words please do
shout out
um join council so each year we do a
call for nominations and
we'd love to have you on council
encourage
application and use of our grants
program each year that money is
allocated and it doesn't go anywhere
else but the grants program
and not many people apply to be honest
so and russell's going to hate me for
this please do apply so we can give out
all the monies
um because we do work hard for that
money and we
probably should call out
uh
the grants program
it's a bit
deliberately open-ended it can be
you have free software you wish to
develop
you have an event you wish to run you
have an event you are running through a
different auspice
and would like some assistance
uh
major sponsorships are generally had it
differently but
still the same sort of
concepts
you
wish to
go to an event run by a different group
eight would be
in the before times it would be a
perfectly valid grant request if you are
a
python developer just getting started on
core python
to ask for a grant to attend python us
for example
because
that will clearly enhance the free
software community and the linux
australia community in general
so
we don't
have specific examples but
if you can make a reasonable claim that
this will help the linux australia
community
then yes we will seriously consider the
money
uh to be to be
for that to be a good use of our money
so i can provide two examples one was um
software freedom day asked for some
sponsorship money to
run the event last year so we've um
sponsored that another group has
approached us to provide pizza for the
year for their their user group and you
know we're more than happy if it brings
people together we will do that and
we've also sponsored the revival of some
projects that may have gone by the
wayside and developers have left
so we will we provided
funding to be able to revive the website
do some jazzing up of the documentation
and bring bring that community back to
life again um so it's actually quite
nice to see that that's going to a
diverse range of
um
causes as well
um the other thing that we would love
for is volunteers to help out with media
as i said comms government responses and
the session selection committee um so
the session selection committee is the
committee that decides on what talks you
attend um at lca and they do an amazing
job each year um there's about 30 people
that are on the session selection
committee but we could do it more um
because there is lots of sessions to
to go through a review but it's a
rewarding experience because you get to
see talks like this one i mean
um there's other talks that you know
they've gone through and we we talk
through it all and we review it it goes
wonderfully
all right next slide please
excellent
think we have
somehow run off the end of things
slightly quicker than we
had hoped
uh as we said we will take talks
uh take questions take discussion in the
post talk discussion video room
if you don't wish to speak there is text
chat in that room you can ask questions
on text
i expect a few of our other
uh current
and former council members will
be in that room as well and probably
some story time i suspect
story time is always fun
so we will see you all in that room
thank you
excellent thank you sarah and julian i
think the old outage is that adage is
that it takes a village to raise a child
and in this case it takes a community to
run a conference so thank you for all
your hard work and dedication
i couldn't get to the agm yesterday i
was too busy wrangling speakers so
congratulations on your times on the
panel and congratulations to the new
incumbents
whoever you are i will meet you soon and
looking forward to seeing all of the
people signing up
having been involved in community stuff
before
when i was asked to wrangle yeah i can
do that i've done that before when i was
asked to emcee okay this is going to
step back into my brain but deep in the
dark past i actually did some public
speaking wrangling and
tell me believe me that when you run
carols by candlelight and you're the guy
driving the car with santa in the front
seat and the kids find you
and then climb onto your boot onto your
roof and onto your bonnet and start
thumping
worse than the worst hailstorm in
canberra
you're a little panicked about what
happens if one of these falls under the
wheel of the car i'm driving to get
santa to backstage before he's announced
and rudolf finishes so that was a very
stressful carols by candlelight a lot of
years ago
and then when i got home the person i
entrusted my camera to said oh no i left
that there for you to pick up so back to
the park i went to find my camera still
sitting on the
verge of the park where carol's work
can't slide have been held but enough of
my war stories thank you so much for
your time looking forward to chatting
with everybody over in the big blue room
talk to you soon bye for now
see ya