Blog entries tagged with "everythingopen"

Last week I drove up to Canberra for the fourth Everything Open conference the spiritual successor to linux.conf.au, this was fitting as the last time I was in Canberra was for LCA back in 2013. I did post about the first Everything Open back in 2023, and while I did attend the subsequent conferences in Gladstone and Adelaide, I didn’t write anything substantial up about those, I took the lazy approach of just tooting and boosting on Mastodon.

So now that it has been a few days, what are the topics that have stayed with me?

AI… of course…

There were a few talks about AI but there were also a number of ad-doc conversations. Unlike some of my co-workers, I didn’t encounter anyone that was exicted about AI. The mood was more cautious, while it could be a useful tool eventually or in specific circumstance, there is currently too much hype and slop.

The talks specifically about AI that I went to were:

• Roll for initiative: The battle against the beast of AI Slop from J Rosenbaum
• Peak Text: AI and the Golden Age of Libraries and Archives from Keir Winesmith

Keir Winesmith’s keynote provided two alternate meanings for “AI” that resonated with how I have been feeling:

• Archival Intelligence – in that it is only drawing from what we have already put into archives, you might get a response that is new to you, but it is not new to the person that previously wrote it
• Averaged Inputs – responses are what is statistically likely, so they will be at the middle of the bell curve, not bad and not good, just an average of what has been provided before

Another ongoing topic of these conferences is a blend of digital rights, community and maintenance, things that are getting harder and harder in this capitalist world:

• Own Your Online World: Protecting Privacy and Rights with Confidence from Gyle dela Cruz
• The unreasonable cost of open source contribution from Rob Norris
• Excited Developer Syndrome from Evan Kohilas
• I accidentally became a FOSS maintainer and all I got was this lousy insight into librarianship from Hugh Rundle
• README: The Developer’s forgotten love letter from Swapnil Ogale
• Reclaiming the open web: a story about big tech, platforms and millennial dreams of a connected web from Milly Schmidt
• Wabi Sabi Software: Caring for Imperfect Projects in Public from Sam Bishop
• The Magic of the Open Practice Library from Elise Elkerton
• Open Australia: Who we are, what we do, and what’s in it for you. from Donna Benjamin

A couple of these overlap with my views on AI, such as the exited developer can now generate shiny code faster but they will still not be around to deal with maintenance, some code may be generated but has it also been documented for those in the future to maintain?

While writing up this post I also looked back over some previous posts about conferences and I was reminded of the talks about rockstar developers at LCA 2017 in Hobart. While previously to get away with being a rockstar a person needed to have decent skills and the excitement/drive/obsession to churn out shiny things, now it is the AI models that are doing the heavy lifting.

As for how the conference itself was run, it doesn’t compare against the peak of LCA, but there was talk that it is gaining momentum. While nothing is set yet, there are moves towards Brisbane 2027. If that happens, I will be there.

However for now I need to ensure that my photos from the drive up, around and back from Canberra do not fall into the backlog…

For three days last week I did something that I haven’t done in over three years, attended an in-person conference in the form of Everything Open.

To steal the conference blurb:

Everything Open is running for the first time in 2023. Linux Australia has decided to run this event to provide a space for a cross-section of the open technologies communities to come together in person. The conference draws upon the experience of the many events that have been run by Linux Australia and its subcommittees, starting with CALU (Conference of Australian Linux Users) in 1999, linux.conf.au over the past twenty years, and the Open Source Developers Conference (OSDC).

Everything Open is a grassroots conference with a focus on open technologies, the community that has built up around this movement and the values that it represents. The presentations cover a broad range of subject areas, including Linux, open source software, open hardware, open data, open government, open GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives and museums), to name a few. There are technical deep-dives into specific topics from project contributors, as well as tutorials on building hardware or using a piece of software, not to mention talks covering the inner workings of our communities.

At the core of Everything Open is the community. The conference is entirely organised by volunteers who have a passion for bringing together the open technologies communities to share their collective experience. Everything Open is a not for profit event that aims to provide attendees with a world-class conference at a down to earth rate.

It was a bit weird but also quite familiar to be back at a conference. Although I had been back at in-person events for a while in the form of comedy shows and camera club meetings/outings, this was three full days of interesting presentations as well as a variety of dicsussions between scheduled talks. I have been attending conferences like this since 2004 (all twelve OSDC Australia and eight in-person linux.conf.au conferences) and there are a number of people that I only know from these events.

There has been (and will still be) some discussion about whether the change from linux.conf.au to Everything Open is good or bad, but I can say that for me I support the change. I will even admit that I did not attend linux.conf.au for the Linux content, but for the other related talks, the talks about related open source technologies or activities. I wouldn’t be able to follow along with a talk about something specific to the Linux kernel, but I would happily listen to someone talk about how GPS works or the toxic (literally poisonous) history of wallpaper. I miss the content of an OSDC, and was glad that the topics of an LCA were getting broader.

It was always awk2ard to tell someone I was going to LCA and then have to explain Linux to them, so I agree that changing the name to Everything Open makes it more inclusive for everyone.

The recordings are still being uploaded to the Everything Open YouTube channel and once they are I will try to come back and update this post with links to my favourites, but for now I will link to the one talk that has stuck in my mind because what was demonstrated doesn’t seem like it should have been possible…

Houdini of the Terminal: The need for escaping – David Leadbeater (Everything Open 2023)