Linux Australia acknowledges some quiet achievers – the Community Recognition Awards
February 1, 2009
I guess it’s fitting that quiet achievers be quietly rewarded, but I suspect Linux Australia’s Community Recognition Awards flew completely under the radar at LCA. The awards went to:
- Janet Hawtin: For designing the Linux Australia and Open Source Industry Australia logos and commitment to community development.
- Alison Russell: For acting as speaker liaison for the conference over many years & compiling the LCA-HowTo for future bid teams.
- Hugh Blemings: For helping build and maintain the Linux Australia and IBM relationship in support of linux.conf.au over the past 10 years.
Congratulations, winners. 
In case you’re wondering, these awards were given out in lieu of the Rusty Wrench awards this year. Really good to see that LA stepped up and acknowleged the very vital role that behind the scenes volunteers play.
Gina Trapani on ‘Crowdsourcing a better Gmail’
February 3, 2008
Gina Trapani is well known for her work as the Editor of Lifehacker US – I met her when I became the Editor of the Australian version, Lifehacker AU.
Lifehacker publishes tech tips, tricks and hacks – and is known for favouring FOSS apps over paid ones. It also features apps written by the Lifehacker team itself. Probably the best known of these apps is Better Gmail – a Firefox extension rooted in the Greasemonkey code base, which aggregates a number of Gmail-related user scripts into a single interface.
Gina recently gave a talk at the Web Directions North conference in Canada in which she told the very cool story of how Better Gmail came into being. She called it “Crowdsourcing a better Gmail“. In Gina’s words: “Suddenly I found myself leading a distributed software project that involved dozens of developers without even intending to! ”
She’s kindly made the transcript of her talk available through Lifehacker, and I highly recommend you read it for an insight into how an idea to use Greasemonkey to create a Firefox extension turned into a “crowdsourced” open source development project which involved liaising with developers across the world – including Google itself. The app ended up translated into over 20 different languages, thanks to the efforts of FOSS volunteers worldwide. Incidentally, the talk also makes the point that APIs are so important – kudos to Google for releasing a GMail API suitable for use with Greasemonkey to encourage open source development with its product.
Congratulations to Gina, and thank you for sharing this very interesting insight into open source community development and community management!
OSCON 2008 – call for participation
January 20, 2008
OSCON – the O’Reilly Open Source Convention is being held in Portland Oregon this September – and this year will be celebrating not only 10 years of OSCON, but also ten years of “the Open Source Initiative, of Mozilla, and of the term “Open Source”, blogs Allison Randall at O’Reilly Radar.
OSCON will be co-located with the Ubuntu Live conference, if you need another reason to be there.
Submissions for OSCON presentations close on February 4th, and they’re especially keen to see proposals for papers on state-of-the-art open source technology, which also look ahead to the future of open source.