Closure of advogato.org

The deadline for the written paper for OSDC was today. My talk is fairly fluffy—I just wanted another excuse to visit Melbourne and hopefully actually meet an entire crowd of Australian geeks that I know by name but haven’t met—but I dutifully wrote up the paper today, cribbing a section on the history of Planets from my old essay on the subject. Andrew read my paper this evening after I’d submitted it and carefully pointed out that my information about Advogato was out of date. Raph Levien is planning to take it down. (Note though that almost inevitably someone has offered to step up to the plate.)

I copied all of my old diary entries off Advogato to my tech log some time ago, but decided I should rescue one more piece of content, my essay on Questions your conference website should answer.

That essay came out of a giant discussion about trying to get members of LinuxChix to submit to linux.conf.au: probably I think for the 2003 conference in Perth (I drafted it in 2003 and published it a year later, which is about four years better than I’ve done with HOWTO pay for Free Software, which is still in draft form). It turned out that people were being put off by the jargon used in the call for papers, paper being the worst jargon of all. It’s an oddly good time to re-visit it, if only to re-format it for the move, because I’m in the middle of reviewing the crazy (good crazy) number of presentation and tutorial proposals for linux.conf.au 2007. I should have some comments on that process (in fact, I have made a giant mailing list post about the l.c.a. review process and its aims, strengths and weaknesses) after the decisions are made. And then, for a reason I don’t fully understand, I’ll also be reviewing for PyCon 2007. I get free admission for doing that, anyone want to fly me to Texas in February?

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