[FOSS4G-Oceania] FOSS4G Workshops and OSGeo-Live

[Cameron Shorter]

Am I right in understanding that workshop participants will be expected 
to bring their own laptop? Consistent feedback in Lessons Learned from 
past FOSS4G workshops is that getting a classroom full of 
"bring-your-own-laptops" is both error prone and time consuming, often 
taking the first hour of the workshop.

Advice usually comes back to "it is best to have all the computers 
pre-installed with software required". This puts a hefty burden on 
workshop organisors and presenters to source computers and set them all 
up with software.

Something that many of the conferences have started doing is installing 
the OSGeo-Live on all workshop computers. OSGeo-Live is a Lubuntu linux 
distribution which comes pre-installed with ~ 50 of the best OSGeo 
applications, along with sample data. It can either be booted from a 
USB, or installed into a Virtual Machine. I'd suggest that we should be 
considering this for our workshops too, and encouraging workshop 
presenters to make use of OSGeo-Live.

We should also encourage all participants to install OSGeo-Live onto the 
laptop before coming to the conference, and we should have a stack of 
spare OSGeo-Live USBs floating around for those people who haven't got 
themselves setup.

(I should declare here my personal vested interest in OSGeo-Live, as I'm 
one of the founders of the project - it started as part of the FOSS4G 
2009 conference in Sydney).

-- 
Cameron Shorter
Technology Demystifier
Open Technologies and Geospatial Consultant

M +61 (0) 419 142 254