Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

General Questions

How did OSDC begin?

There are very few conferences in Australia that cater specifcally to open source developers, particularly those who develop cross-platform software. There are many conferences designed to cater for subsets of developers such as programmers of .NET and Java, however these often have very little focus on open source development. The linux.conf.au conference has a great focus on open source, however it primarily caters to Linux kernal programmers, those interested in operating system design, and those developing tools which are Linux specific. The Open Source Developers' Conference is dedicated to open source development for all operating systems.

What is OSDC?

The Open Source Developers' Conference is an Australian-run, non-profit conference for the people who write, use and support open source software. It is an excellent environment for open source developers to learn from their peers and be involved in the open source community. OSDC focusses on the development of software using open source tools and languages, even where this software is not itself open sourced.

What will attendees get out of attending OSDC?

OSDC is a great place for developers to learn more about what's out there. Too often developers find themselves too busy solving tasks in the now, to learn better solutions for tomorrow. OSDC helps to overcome that by helping developers learn about new tools, tricks and practices that will help them be more efficient. In meeting other developers, we hope that attendees will develop a network of skilled friends and professionals whom they can refer to for years to come.

Who is the target audience of the conference?

This is a conference designed for software developers who use and/or write open source tools. Previous years have had a large attendance from Perl, Python and PHP programmers, but developers of all languages are encouraged to attend.

Talks vary from introductory level through to the deeply technical, as well as a few talks on broad topics affecting developers (such as dealing with managers, making money from open source etc). Most talks will be designed for existing programmers.

Non programmers and other Free Software advocates are encouraged to view the timetable and proposed talks when deciding whether to attend. If there is sufficient interest, a partners' programme will be run to provide daytime entertainment for partners and family of conference attendees.

Where is the conference?

OSDC 2008 will be held at the SMC Conference and Function centre in the Sydney CBD, a short walking distance from the Central, Town Hall and Museum train stations. It is located at 66 Goulburn Street.

Registration will be in the foyer on the ground floor.

A map can be found here

When is the conference?

The day of tutorials will be run on the 2nd December and run between 9am and 5pm.

The technical programme for the conference will run from Wednesday 3th - Friday 5th December 2008. Registrations will open at 8am on the Wednesday and 8:30am on both the Thursday and Friday. Conference material will start at 9am on all three days and finish at 5:30pm.

The conference dinner will be held on-site from 6pm - 10pm on the Wednesday night.

Potential Speaker Questions

What is a proposal?

A "proposal" is a short summary of what you'd like to talk about. It doesn't have to be exactly what you end up talking about, but it should be close.

What is an abstract?

An "abstract" is a short summary of what you're actually talking about. If you don't provide one, it'll be the same as your proposal.

What is a paper?

For the purposes of this conference, a "paper" is a document that covers the topic that you intend to talk about. Ideally it should include an introduction to your subject, a discussion on your subject (why it's cool, what you learnt, how it works...), any conclusions you can draw and a list of further references. We'd like it to be written up into an article along the same lines as you might send into a journal or magazine, but we'll accept a copy of your slides if that's the best you can do. (Slides will not be included in the printed conference proceedings).

The purpose of your paper is to give attendees a resource they can use to find out more about your talk topic.

What is a presentation?

A presentation or talk is a 30 or 60 minute session where in you talk about your chosen topic. The session time also includes set-up and take down time, and time for audience questions; thus you won't actually be speaking for a full 30 or 60 minutes.

What is a lightning talk?

A lightning talk is a 7 minute talk. It's enough time to talk about one topic in brief. Lightning talks are a great place for those who have never spoken at a conference before to have a go. No matter what your chosen topic, it's very hard to go wrong when you've only got 7 minutes. Lightning talks don't require slides, but you're welcome to create them if you wish.

The lightning talks will be presented in blocks throughout the conference. To sign up for a lightning talk, just add your talk title and name up on the board during the conference.

What is a tutorial?

A tutorial is a half or full day session where you teach a topic to your class. This may include having worked examples and group exercises. Class sizes for tutorials are unknown at this stage, but it may be reasonable to assume you'll have a class size of 6-10 people.

What is a BOF (Birds of a Feather)?

A BOF is a 1-2 hour, typically informal, interactive session for interested people to work together on something. As a few examples, there may be a key-signing BOF where those who use public key encryption can get together, meet each other and offer to sign each other's keys. There may be a networking BOF where people are encouraged to meet each other and exchange business details. Another BOF may enable a number of people who are involved in project or subscribed to a mailing list, to get together and meet each other face to face.

BOFs are usually organised in the week before the conference or at the conference. If you'd like to offer to run one, please contact program@osdc.com.au

What kind of talks can I give?

There are three lengths of talks: Lightning, Standard and Long.

Lightning talks are very short talks designed to cover a single topic or idea in very little depth. These may be amusing, informative or both. Lightning talks will typically be attended by the entire conference audience. They are a great place for a beginner speaker to start.

Standard length talks are designed to give you sufficient time to cover a number of related topics in some depth. Under most situations we'd encourage you to pick a Standard length talk.

Long talks are designed to give experienced speakers a chance to cover some topics in a greater depth.

Standard and Long talks will typically get approximately 1/3 of the audience; so up to 100 people. Most talks will be presented as a lecture, with questions left to the end. If you wish to give a demonstration please talk to us to make sure that we can ensure we'll have sufficient technology to make it visible to the entire audience. If you'd like to run a Question and Answer session, we'd encourage you to consider running a BOF instead.

If you're uncertain of what is the best kind of talk for you to give, please contact us.

Does my talk have to be about an open source project?

We don't require that your end product is open source, or that you've contributed to any open source projects.  But we do require that your talk be interesting to open source developers.  For example we welcome talks about how you used a number of open source programs together to achieve your goal as well as talks about how using a particular library saved your project.  These talks are welcome even if you can't share the end code.

We're also very happy to have talks which compare a number of similar products and explores their strengths and weaknesses (for example databases or VOIP).  However these talks must be presented in an open source development context: for example discussing freely available APIs for common programming languages in addition to covering the common feature sets.

Please note that we are not soliciting sales pitches, or advertisements for future products.  If you sell your product and want to give a talk on it, then think hard about how you can make your talk relevant to our audience.  See the section on getting your paper accepted for some hints.  Likewise, if your product doesn't exist yet, perhaps you can talk about something related which does.

Who will be my audience?

Your audience will almost all be developers, although their level of experience in your particular field may vary. If you intend to cover very introductory concepts, or alternatively very advanced concepts please ensure you mention this in your abstract and, if possible, in the title of your talk as well.

What technology will be available to me?

All speakers will have access to a data projector and microphone. It is preferable to use your own laptop for the presentation. If you need a laptop or any other technologies, please let us know prior to the conference. We encourage you to ensure that all the files you need for your demonstration are set-up and ready to go before your talk, as it's very easy to get flustered and waste valuable time once your talk has commenced.

Please also ensure that you have a backup of your slides on a CD and/or a USB key. This will allow you to still give your talk even in the case of technical difficulties.

Should I show code on my slides?

Yes, please do. However, be aware that code is harder to read than normal words, so please use a big font, and limit the amount of code on each slide. Highlight the relevant portions if applicable.

How do I get a talk/paper accepted?

Please ensure you perform spelling and grammar checking on your proposal before submitting it. Proposals that are easy to read and understand are much more likely to be accepted. Asking a friend or two to read your proposal before you submit it is a great way to get feedback.

To get a paper accepted follow the instructions on the Call for Papers. In particular take care to make sure that your topic is likely to be of interest to the conference attendees. That is, make sure that it fits into one of the following categories:

We're going to have a lot of proposals to sift through. Clever titles are great, but try to keep them short. Really long talk titles are difficult to work with, and difficult to read. Make sure that your proposal covers how the topic is interesting to our target audience and how it fits into one of the above categories.

For example a proposal as follows:

Title: A brand new world.

Description: A introduction to the .NET platform. This paper will cover the ECMA standards for C# and .NET. .NET is a cross-platform development framework created by Microsoft. It provides a managed runtime environment which takes responsibility for tasks such as creating objects, calling methods, handling memory and interacting with the operating system. It includes compilers that target its virtual machine for C#, Perl, Python, Haskell and many other languages.

may be rejected out of hand, as although .NET is cross-platform, Microsoft's implementation is not open source, and there's no tie-in between this talk and any of the categories. However, if we rewrite the proposal as:

Title: A brand new world.

Description: A introduction to Mono and the .NET platform. This paper will cover the ECMA standards for C# and .NET. .NET is a cross-platform development framework created by Microsoft. It provides a managed runtime environment which takes responsibility for tasks such as creating objects, calling methods, handling memory and interacting with the operating system. It includes compilers that target its virtual machine for C#, Perl, Python, Haskell and many other languages.

Mono is an open source implementation of .NET for UNIX. It allows developers to write clients, and server-side applications which deploy seamlessly on Linux, Netware, MacOS and Microsoft Windows each with a native look and feel.

then it is much more likely to be accepted. The latter proposal establishes that the talk is about an open source project and is generally applicable to open source programmers.

A further example is below:

Title: Translating LP records into mp3s

Description: It's getting harder and harder to find good LP players these days. Further as time goes on LPs tend to warp, accumulate scratches and suffer other degradation. In the past LPs were bought because they gave such a "warm" sound unlike that of the cassette tape. How can we convert non-pristine LPs into recordings that keep that warmth without including the hiccoughs, bumps and scratches?

With technology making gigantic leaps and bounds, we found that we could scan an image of the LP, do an image analysis of the result, and use that to identify scratches and errors in our sound recordings.

This project, while it sounds interesting, doesn't mention anything to do with open source. It's quite possible that they used open source tools to achieve their task, but they don't say. Perhaps they used closed source tools, or wrote their own. It doesn't say they open sourced their end code either. Rather than writing something like the above, make sure you specify how it is relevant to the audience:

Title: Translating LP records into mp3s

Description: It's getting harder and harder to find good LP players these days. Further as time goes on LPs tend to warp, accumulate scratches and suffer other degradation. In the past LPs were bought because they gave such a "warm" sound unlike that of the cassette tape. How can we convert non-pristine LPs into recordings that keep that warmth without including the hiccoughs, bumps and scratches?

With technology making gigantic leaps and bounds, we found that we could scan an image of the LP, do an image analysis of the result, and use that to identify scratches and errors in our sound recordings. Further, we were able to do almost all of this using open source tools and have packaged up the result and called it LPconvert.

In this talk we show how some unlikely combinations of existing tools, plus a few scripts of our own, enabled us to save our LP collection.

What if I can't make the deadlines?

If you are having difficulties with a deadline, please let us know as soon as possible - this will make it much easier for us to work with you to find a solution.

Similarly, if you find that you have to pull out of presenting, again, please let us know as soon as possible. Telling us the week before makes the conference scheduling very very tricky.

If my talk is accepted, will I still need to pay the admission fee for attendees?

No, conference attendance, including the dinner, is free for speakers.

If my talk is accepted, will you cover travel and/or accommodation expenses? Will you cover international travel?

Unfortunately we do not have the funds to cover any speaker expenses. If you can only make it to the conference if your costs are subsidised, please let us know. It may be possible for us to encourage one of our excellent sponsors to help cover these costs, but we can make no guarantees.

If my talk is accepted, will I receive any payment above expenses?

Unfortunately we do not have the funds to provide payment to conference speakers. We plan to provide some payment to our tutorial presenters, however details are yet to be determined.

What do I need to do once my talk is accepted?

Once your talk is accepted you need to start writing your paper. As mentioned above, a paper is ideally an article about your chosen topic which allows attendees to learn more about your talk topic (even if they missed your talk). Your paper need not cover new research or original work. All it needs is to be is a reasonable discussion of your topic such that you might expect to find in a HOWTO, a relevant page on a website, or a explanation on a mailing list. More formal papers are welcome as well. There are some links to papers from previous years here.

A simple paper might consist of 2-3 pages with the following information:

The Call for papers gives you a maximum length for your paper. You don't need to use all of that, and likewise if you need an extra little smidgen of space, we can probably let you have it (please ask!).

To ensure high quality conference content, we will be peer reviewing all papers. So you must submit a proper paper, and we will not accept a copy of your slides as a paper.

Please ensure you perform spelling and grammar checking on your paper before submitting it for review. Our reviewers' time is limited and you will get much more useful feedback if the reviewer isn't spending all of their time commenting on spelling and grammatical errors. Asking a friend or two to read your paper before you submit it is a great way to get feedback.

Make sure you get your finished paper in by the date specified in the call for papers. This will allow us to ensure that your paper is reviewed by two people. The review will cover aspects such as how well your paper flows, how it could be more interesting, and suggestions for improvement.

You will be given your reviewers comments and some time to improve your paper. You must get your improved paper in by the final deadline.