LCA2010 – a first timers overview

Well, LCA2010 drew to a close here in Wellington yesterday with the final event being the Penguin Dinner just after Brisbane was announced as the next host city for LCA2011.  The preceding week has been a great chance for geeks to meet, hack, discuss, debate, fix, help, recruit, teach and share with other geeks.  A wide range of geekery was represented, from Linux kernel hackers, to source control experts (notably representatives from the GitHub and Ubuntu Launchpad projects), to documentation lovers (yes, they exist, I saw some!) all the way down (or up?) to hardware hackers soldering together Arduino/Pebble kits and developing technology to win the Lunar X Prize (hello, Lunar Numbat).

For me, the highlights of this week have been:

• Seeing HTML5 support for the Video tag, and in particular seeing realtime video processing with Javascript (example here)
• An overview of Drupal 7 by Webchick including writing a sample “Pirate Module”
• Various presentations by Paul Fenwick, including a piece of social genius, a proposed Facebook application called “AntiSocial” (keep an eye on his blog for more info)
• The LCA2010 Hackoff organised by the Wellington Perlmongers group – our team did well, answering 3 out of the 6 questions (with the solution to #4 arriving minutes after the contest has closed)
• The Pengiun dinner, where some* Epic Beer was consumed (Epic were a sponsor of LCA2010) and a whopping $33,000 dollars was raised for the Lifeflight Trust at the charity auction (winning prize was a trip for four on the rescue helicopter with some good old fashioned winching on 8mm steel cable)
• An overview by  Patrick Brennan from Albany Senior High School (a new school) where he spoke about the massive savings they made by choosing to go completely open-source for their new school.  It was a delight to see the passion that the entire board has for the philosophy of free software.
• Following and contributing to the vibe of the conference in realtime with Twitter via the lca2010 hashtag

Everything worked very smoothly with the conference venue being more than adequate and with power and internet access never being an issue, although there were a few times where I had to charge my iPod from my laptop battery.  Each session was streamed live and the archived videos will be available at a later stage once they’ve been processed and made available online.

Also, being able to stay with Adam and Amy was a great advantage with their apartment being only about three blocks from the Wellington Convention Centre and right on Courtenay Place.

Finally, a heartfelt thanks to Andrew and Susanne for organising the conference, and to the hordes of crew, support people, volunteers, ghosts and incidentals who made the event such a pleasure to attend.

* Ok, way too much