Manda QoP

It's been a busy 2½ years helping out first with OSDC (Open Source Developers Conference) and then immediately jumping in to helping run lca2015 (Linux Conf Australia). Looks like another may be en route as well... watch this space... Whilst it's very rewarding helping to run a conference, there are also some traps for new players that I've learned about on the way. Luckily the first conference was a lot smaller than the second, so the lessons learned weren't quite so brutal as they could have been if they were discovered during lca2015. These pitfalls can be especially hard on those with certain mental illnesses and anxiety disorders, so I've come up with a top 10 list of how to protect your head space when helping to organise a conference. Make sure you have a 2IC/team for anything you're working on so that if you need to, you can take a month or two out without any feelings of worry or guilt. Remember to keep in touch with the team though so that ...

HARDWARE GEEKERY When: Wednesday 28th May 2008 @ 6pm Where: Microsoft House, Level 5, 22 Viaduct Harbour Ave, Auckland Central Cost: $30 from www.girlgeekdinners.co.nz The theme for this event will be hardware development, including designing modern home entertainment systems (codecs/coding/firmware) and building homemade game console interfaces. These speakers know which end of a soldering iron to hold. J We have Cherie Carbines and Steven Ellis from OpenMedia who will be demonstrating MediaCentres and explaining the technical nitty gritty that goes into building them, plus we have a young lady called Tamara Olliver as a speaker. When Tamara was 15 she rebuilt the playstation dance mat to make it more robust then open sourced the code and hardware designs. There will be a quiz and maybe some other fun things to get everyone talking and mingling. Tickets are available from the website: http://girlgeekdinners.co.nz/ and I will need to limit them to 50 because of the venue size, so firs...