michaelcarden.net

Linux Conf Au 2010

LCA 2010 starts in just a few days (January 18) and I’m mighty jealous that I won’t be there.

I first attended LCA in 2005, not at all confident of having the geek skills needed to understand it all, and I had a ball. Simon Phipps from Sun, Eben Moglen from the SFLC and Tridge’s hilarious expose of Bitkeeper ‘hacking’ were just some of the highlights. I was hooked.

2006 I crossed the Tasman to Dunedin, 2007 I was a speaker in Sydney, 2008 a great week in Melbourne and in 2009 I walked up and down that hill at U-Tas several times a day. Huge experiences each and every one.

And a year ago when I heard that 2010 would be in Wellington NZ, I rejoiced because I love New Zealand and I love Wellington. I started imagining my LCA 2010 experience.

Then reality intervened. Mostly in the shape of money, or the lack of it. Work had paid for four of my five previous LCA experiences, but this time around the work piggy bank was empty. I might have paid for myself but my very good friends at the Australian Tax Office had other plans and required me to start paying for my recent Uni education. Bye bye several thousand dollars.

But I can’t resist looking. I keep surfing the LCA web site and drooling over what I won’t see. And today my drooling paid off big time.

I was re-reading the details of the keynote speakers and I idly clicked the link to the blog of Gabriella Coleman from NYU. There I found a PDF preprint of her paper, “The Hacker Conference: A Ritual Condensation and Celebration of a Lifeworld.” It’s a wordy title, as most academic papers seem to have, but it’s a ripping read. It examines the hacker conference as a social phenomenon via Gabriella’s experiences at Debconfs and others.

See how many people you recognise from the photos in the paper. Then try not to tell me how much fun you’re having at LCA while I sit back in Canberra and cry into my beer.