Mark Kowarsky

Last week I was interviewed for Open Source On The Air, an online radio show made by James Purser.

You can download the whole show in either mp3 or ogg formats. Additionally, my good friend Jorge has made an edited version available: Ogg Vorbis, mp3: high quality and low quality.

Read below if you want a transcript of the show.

Read more!

Seems that a little bit of advertising goes a long way online. We have expanded from a channel of less than dozen to a channel of less than thirty, almost overnight.

This couldn't have happened without the help of people getting the word out on IRC and on their blogs. So I would like to thank them for helping to start establish our community down-under.

• A new Aussie Distro Channel - James Purser's blog
• Gentoo-AU is (Re)Born! - rob's blog and GLUG's ML
• Anyone else that mentioned it

I have also been interviewed for Open Source On The Air and mention a few things about Gentoo in general, and Gentoo-Au. I will blog about this more later, after the interview is broadcast (at 9:30pm AEST for those who are interested.)

While reading Australian Personal Computer magazine I came across an interview with one of the members of the Ubuntu Australian Team.

This together with events such as the Gentoo UK 2006 Conference have pursuaded me that I would like to create a similar community in Australia.

So, 4 weeks 5 days (16h 56m 15s) ago I decided to revive the #gentoo-au channel on Freenode. Currently there are a few less than a dozen different people in it, but the community seems to slowly be growing thanks to word of mouth, and the forum thread I made some ago.

Plans still need to be written up for a website, that will contain all the information necessary to organise conferences down under. My goal is to aim for a mini-conf at linux.conf.au 2008. Hopefully before then we can even organise a meetup of some kind to try to spread the word about Gentoo on a grass-roots level.

Any readers of this from Australia, please join #gentoo-au, and we will see what community we can build.

A little delayed, but I would like to introduce the following people as the Gentoo User Representatives:

• cheater1034
• kopp
• CoffeeBuzz
• nephros
• Richard Fish
• loki99
• Q-collective
• lxnay
• toskala
• cokehabit
• likewhoa

They can be contacted via the email alias userreps@gentoo.org, or found in the #gentoo-userreps channel on freenode.

Currently no projects have been started by them (that I know of), but that will soon change as we (userrel) are having an IRC meeting with them this weekend. I look forward to seeing what we can achieve in the coming year