Linux.Conf.Au 2010

Last week I attended Linux Conf Australia, the annual conference for all things Open Source down under, this year held in Wellington, New Zealand, the city where I live.

I was very lucky to get the opportunity to organize some of the displays at the conference. An application developed for the conference displayed information such as timetables for talks, social events and photos taken by the attendees. It also showed off my latest visualization, Gource, displaying bits of random development from projects like the Linux Kernel.

Here’s a video of the displays I made for the conference.

The Life Flight Trust, the emergency helicopter rescue service for the Wellington area, was the featured charity of the conference. Attendees were encouraged to make donations, with the reward that the largest donor would be able to participate in a helicopter winching exercise. I was asked if I could come up with a way to display the donations, and ended up adapting a live graph prototype we’d developed at work (inspired by ‘Stack’ from Digg Labs).

We displayed the live donation feed during the Pengion Dinner, a dinner for professional delegates on the last day of the conference. By the end of the evening, LCA delegates had raised more than $30,000 for the Life Flight Trust!

Helping out with the conference was a really cool experience and totally worth all the time I invested. Be sure to check videos of the talks from LCA which should start appearing on their website tentatively.