Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Schedules, schwag and schregistrations


So we may still be a good 4 months away from linux.conf.au 2012, but things are already starting to get pretty crazy for us here on the organising team. To help show some of the behind the scenes things that are going on for the conference, we decided to start this organisers blog where we can leak, preview, vent and generally show off all manner of things about what we've got in store for the week in Ballarat next January.

Where are we at then? Well we have some awesome venues booked, obviously the University of Ballarat itself for the main conference but we've also got a real treat in store for those attending our Penguin Dinner, Speakers Dinner and Professional Delegates Networking session. We've tried to put together things that are uniquely Ballarat and so we're pretty confident everyone lucky enough to come along will have a ball.

We also made our first major announcement for a while this week with the release of the draft conference schedule: http://linux.conf.au/programme/schedule
The papers committee put in a fantastic effort and have come up with what we consider to be a simply amazing lineup. There's a lot of the linux.conf.au regulars, but we've also aimed to get in a lot of new faces as well. Most impressively, approximately 24% of the selected talks will be given by women, which is a seriously encouraging continuation of the increasing trend the conference has seen in this regard over the past few years. It should go without saying, but for anyone who still has their doubts, I want to stress that this figure was reached with absolutely no need for a selection bias and gender was not considered as a criteria in any way, shape or form.

Over the coming few days and weeks we've got some huge announcements coming up, so keep your eyes out for these. We hope to spill some more behind the scenes beans shortly too to help give anyone interested a look at the various rooms etc we're looking at using.

To conclude, I'll leave you all with a little sneak peak of the first piece of schwag that has arrived recently:


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