Linux Users of Victoria, Inc.

We are looking for people who are interested in helping share the awesome that is free software, by giving a talk or tute on Software Freedom Day (Saturday 19th September). Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to communicate to a beginners or intermediate audience, in approximately 25 minutes, some project or aspect of free software that gives you warm fuzzies and helps you sleep well at night knowing the world is a better place, or at least makes you go, "Huh. Neat."

Listed below are some ideas to get you thinking. Please email brianna [dot] laugher [at] gmail [dot] com when you know what you want to enthuse about.

Note: Don't think you are not qualified to talk if you are a beginner or a recently-reformed beginner. Recently reformed beginners are some of the best people to communicate with beginners, because they remember precisely just how daunting and baffling everything was...

Introductory

• What is software freedom?
  - incl. history of free software movement
• Free software licenses
  - could perhaps just be a component in a general talk on software freedom
• How do open source projects work?
  - how do they get started, how do people contribute, how do people know what to do, who makes final decisions, forking
• How to become an open source developer
  - How to find a project, how to check if it suits you, how to find easy ways to start, submitting patches?
• Open formats/standards & why they matter
• Introduction to free content licensing (Creative Commons)
• Open access (academic publishing)
• OLPC project
• Firefox
• Opera
• Thunderbird
• Wordpress
• Inkscape
• OpenOffice
• Audacity
• GIMP
• GnuCash
• Some feed reader (plus: what are feeds)
• [Your Favourite Free Software Package Goes Here]
• MediaWiki/Wikipedia/some other wiki (contributing)
• HTML/CSS (web design using some particular package?)
• Back-ups
• Demystifying bug trackers (could look at a few - Bugzilla, trac?)
• Beginning programming with Python
• Programming for kids with Squeak/Alice/Scratch
• Introduction to IRC

Intermediate

• Beginning the command line
• How to start your own web site (getting started with shared webhosting using open source tools)
• Beginning source control (concepts + basic commands in svn, bzr)
• Any of the software mentioned in 'Introductory', but with a more advanced take (starting to look at modifying it, e.g. extensions/plugins, how to tweak it yourself)
• Using a debugger
• Practical programming with Python (scripting - solving 'real world' problems)
• Understanding the Linux stack (kernel, window manager, desktop environment, utilities, etc)
• Managing software in Linux (aptitude etc)
• Introduction to databases (not just SQL...)
• Introduction to MVC framework?
• Drupal
• Greasemonkey or more generally, Firefox extensions
• JavaScript
• Emacs :)

Workshops

Any of the packages mentioned above, especially in a "how to achieve X using Y" setting.