Sessions at linux.conf.au 2012 on Friday 20th January

What has the government been spending my money on? Which corporation is responsible for the most oil spills? How much radiation is coming out of the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant? Where are the crime hot spots in my area? To paraphrase Special Agent Mulder, the data is out there...

The web is full of public data but how do you transform the text from some web page into a beautiful map, how can you get the latest updates when information in that CSV file changes? Web scraping can help and ScraperWiki is an open source online tool to make that process simpler and more collaborative. Anyone can write a scraper using the online editor and the code and data are shared with the world. Because it's a wiki, other programmers can help maintain and improve the code.

ScraperWiki is used by projects such as the OpenAustralia Foundation’s PlanningAlerts to gather development applications in your local area, the OpenCorporates project to create an open database of every corporation in the world and journalists in the emerging world of data-driven investigative journalism.

In this presentation I’ll show how you can start to liberate data you’re interested in on the web. This can help you with everything from satisfying a passing curiosity, to being able to bolt on a powerful API to data for your next big web application.

I will provide you with an overview of the ScraperWiki project and what you can do with ScraperWiki and open data in general. We’ll write a simple scraper to show how easy it is for even people with only basic programming knowledge to get started with their own guerrilla data liberation.

In economic and game theory, a "zero-sum game" describes a scenario where success for one individual or entity only comes by failure of another. In FLOSS culture, we strongly value the idea that collaboration and cooperation is a fundamentally superior model for innovation, development, and business. And yet, paradoxically, you'll often see the implicit or explicit assumption that there can be only one "best" text editor, or programming language, or Linux distribution and all others must suffer by comparison. This talk explores why free software is the future of technology, competition vs growth, the hazards of silos, and the green fields beyond feature parity with proprietary software.

In September 2012 the CanberraUAV team will try to rescue 'Outback Joe' as part of the UAV outback challenge. This talk is all about the technology and techniques that we have developed for building an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) that can search for and find a lost bushwalker in outback Australia.

Lightning talk introducing safe-rm, a tool designed to prevent the accidental deletion of important files.