Coffs Ex-Services Computer Club

Software Freedom Day 2006 Coffs Harbour was a stunning success, due entirely to the fantastic team of people who devoted their time and recources. As with the previous year I committed Coffs Harbour to this event with only a vague idea that we'd have the resources to do it, and again the community came through in spades.

Celebrations began on Friday with Cameron Gregg and myself in the town centre, pushing flyers and CDs into the hands of passers-by momentarily blinded by our neon orange Software Freedom Day t-shirts. We handed out approximately 300 flyers, and about 20 CDs. A number of interested people stopped to chat about free software, and a much larger number of people stopped to boast about never having used a computer, some explaining in meticulous detail why they never intend to. We learned a lot.

The day itself started at the indecent hour of 8:00am, when all respectable people should be reading Slashdot in their pajamas and rummaging through the fridge for leftovers. Coffs Ex-Services Computer Club president Max Ward and his wife Marie were on hand to open up our venue at the Professional Centre and within half an hour we had a chain of volunteers hauling the demonstration computers from OpenPC Labs upstairs.

As the our official opening time of 10:00am grew closer, it became apparent that the way the Professional Centre LAN was configured wasn't quite the way it was configured a week earlier, when we visited to test out the network in order to ensure we would have Internet access. Frantic educated guesswork followed until, in classic Hollywood style, the correct numbers were punched in with seconds to spare.

The room quickly filled to capacity, and visitors listened patiently to me running through in turn: the definition of free software, the history of the free software movement, the future of the free software movement, and the very short and inglorious future waiting for the proprietary software world. Apparently I say 'um' a lot when addressing an audience from prepared notes, so I can say with confidence that Richard Stallman need not worry about me; his job is quite safe. By the end of the first question and answer session, what with all the 'um's and so on, it was apparent that my fears that we wouldn't have enough material to keep people entertained for the duration of the day were quite unfounded.

Daniel Billings then wowed the room with a presentation on the use of free software in community groups which was in equal measure a presentation on the use of theatrical skills at free software events. My attempts at taking photos of Daniel at work produced mainly photos of the audience open-mouthed in astonishment. Daniel himself was a blur.

Next came a presentation from Cameron Gregg of Sydney Indymedia and a host of related organisations. After a brief history of Indymedia and the free software that keeps it ticking over, Cameron dropped a bombshell: the launch of a Coffs Harbour Independant Media Centre. He was quickly inundated with eager volunteers.

A short break for lunch followed (we were by now well behind schedule) and on our return we were treated to a short presentation by Peter Rake on using gThumb to manage digital photographs. The phrase "colourful local identity" doesn't come close to doing justice to the legend that is Peter Rake. Several people expressed surprise that he wasn't a fictional character after all, and the majority of attendees were thus greatly reasurred by this evidence that free software isn't just for introverted computer nerds.

Anne Hellou from the Coffs Harbour Education Campus then treated us to a sneak peek at the way they are using Moodle to deliver online training, which elicited some horrifying war stories from audience members who have had the misfortune to be forced to use a similar proprietary product in the past. These were not related to any technical inferiority of the proprietary product, but to the restrictions imposed by the vendor on how the product could be used. Moodle is obviously not encumbered by any such restrictions. You couldn't ask for a better illustration of the benefits of software freedom in education.

David Chapman runs OpenPC Labs, a local business providing free software support and an Internet cafe near the Coffs Harbour Jetty area (he's often asked "is this the new version of Windows?"). Unfortunately he lost one of his planned presentations to schedule slippage, but managed to fit in a demonstration of the use of WINE to run legacy Windows applications. Not only did he demonstrate Internet Explorer running on GNU/Linux, but he managed to run three different versions of Internet Explorer on the one machine, something that I am told is difficult or impossible on the operating system IE was written for.

David also gave us a quick demo of Inkscape, the vector drawing application that, in tandem with the GIMP, was apparently one of the most popular apps on the demonstration systems during the day.

With very little time left, I raced through a presentation I had prepared on the nascent "free culture" movement. Utlimately, all I really needed to do to get the message across was to quote the Free Software Foundation's Eben Moglen: "In the twenty-first century, there will be no such thing as an unpublished poet, which is good, because in the twentieth century there was damn near no such thing as a published poet."

As a final treat, Hugh Evans demonstrated XGL and Compiz, leaving us all speechless with a mixture of surprise, mirth, and motion sickness.

Thank You

This event exceeded all expectations and was more fun that can possibly be decent and seemly in this day and age. Gratitude is due to too many people to name, but special effort should be made to recognise the generosity of:

• Linda Ward of the Professional Centre, who stepped in at the 11th hour when we found ourselves without a venue and provided us with the best such venue on the Coffs Coast.
• David Chapman of OpenPC Labs who, for the second year in a row, completely dismantled his shop and reassembled it on the other side of town, so that we could have a wide range of demonstration systems running Mandriva, Ubuntu, Fedora, and Gentoo.
• Our volunteers, particularly Max and Marie Ward who were invaluable in preparing the venue and "nerd-herding" throughout the day.
• All our speakers, particularly Daniel Billings, who also arranged a table of merchandise from ELX, and was a one-man publicity whirlwind.
• The dynamic and beautiful Allison Davidson of Alma Technology, whose quietly efficient organising (as a number of people observed on the day) made it all possible, and proved you can sometimes find great women behind even quite average men.
  

Lessons Learned

• Never try to organise something like this if you suspect grey hair doesn't suit you.
• Separate "newbies" and "nerds" tracks would make the experience less taxing for attendees. Effectively organising two meetings would have been too much to arrange this year, but next year, who knows...?
• Pre-publicity is an issue; getting the local press to cover anything that isn't a sporting event is an uphill battle.
• We didn't get the message out to local educational institutions well enough, and participation from local IT businesses remains limited to those already working virtually exclusively with free software.

Software Freedom Day 2007 Coffs Harbour

This year's event was an order of magnitude bigger and more enjoyable that last year's, so the bar for 2007 is already set very, very high indeed. With a number of people already volunteering to be on the team for the organisation of SFD 2007 things are looking very exciting.

See you in 2007!

Matthew Davidson

SFD2006 Coffs team contact, vice-president Coffs Ex-Services Computer Club, free software user.