Episode: 2482
Title: HPR2482: lca2018: Katie McLaughlin
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2482/hpr2482.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 03:57:07

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This in HBR episode 2482 entitled LCA 2018, KTM Laughlin, it is hosted by Clinton Roy
and in about 42 minutes long, and Karim and exquisite flag, the summary is an interview
with KTM Laughlin at Linux.conf.co 2018.
This episode of HBR is brought to you by an honesthost.com, get 15% discount on all shared
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Good morning to all of our listeners. My name is Clinton Roy, I'm here at Linux
Conf AU 2018 and I have my first guest for the listeners, would you like to introduce
yourself?
Hi, I'm Katie, you may know me as glasant GLA SNT on the internet and Twitter and various
other mediums.
I am the community liaison for LCA 2018 and I'm also running ICON AU this year in Sydney
and you should all come along.
Am I allowed to plug that early in the pocket?
Yeah, go for it.
I mean I might get you on again for a separate one just for that one.
I did that last year for Richard and he sort of freaked out a little bit but that's totally
fine.
I'm here all week, try the broccoli.
So I wasn't aware that you had an official community liaison role with the conference?
Yeah, so I was on the 2016 council and I was the council liaison for LCA and the liaison
for the LCA side.
We happened to end up switching roles because they got on council and I got off council.
So we sort of just flipped sides and so just for a little bit of context for our overseas
years.
The way that a lot of the Australian open source conferences run is that there is an umbrella
organisation called Linux Australia and it has insurance and bank accounts and lots of
money and credit card processing stuff and lots of how to documents and instead of each
open source Australian conference setting up all of that administrative year, they can
basically just run under the auspices of Linux Australia and get all that stuff for free.
That is apparently a fairly unique way of running conferences.
Australia seems to do it a little bit differently, like a lot of overseas conferences.
They seem to have to set up a lot of that stuff individually so I just like to put that
out there to explain things.
It is like because I've been a sort of auxiliary organiser for a number of years but now I'm
the site chair, the sheer amount of stuff I don't have to muck about with now, makes me
really appreciative of what the council and the years and years of people who have been
on the council have done which I'm pretty sure you have done your time in the board at some
point.
Yes, but this is not about me.
So what do you have an official role description for a community liaison?
Liaison with the community.
I'm more of a, when you run an event, you sort of end up in your own little bubble of things
that you want to do and you have such positive reinforcement within that grouping of your
core organisers, that it's helpful to have an outside opinion who understands that yes,
it would be brilliant if you could have elephants turning up in the keynote but logistically
you may not want to have elephants turning up in your keynote, even though you're really
set on having elephants in your keynote, so on a couple of occasions now they've just
bounced ideas of me and it's like well yeah that could work, have you thought about
doing it maybe this way or they've asked me for suggestions about little things that
might help, but it isn't just an honorary role, although sometimes I never feel like
I'm doing enough but that's my own problem because I always feel like I'm never doing
enough no matter what I do.
So can we split up the role into like before the conference and during the conference?
So before the conference there were a couple of meetings every so often where we just
touch base, checking how things are going, whether they've got, yes you've got ticket
sales open a couple of months out, you've got your papers are all together and your proposals
are all set up, you've got this all done in time, here are a few things we're thinking
about, okay that's okay, but on site I haven't really been called up to do anything but
by the time the Saturday and the Sunday before LCA rolls around, if things aren't done
you're at a time so you just let all the balls that you set off just roll and everything's
been really well run, but then again there are being some people that have stepped up to
the mark last minute like our wonderful MC Jack Skinner who has just been a wonderful
happy exuberant face for the morning announcements that it has really helped the communication
I felt, but everything seems to be running smoothly but I'm again on the outside looking
in but I also know a little bit about the sausages need.
So Jack was a last minute thing?
As far as I'm aware, but also he is one who can jump in at the last minute and excels
at that, yeah it's been, I didn't know that he was asked, but also it's been really useful
to have somebody with the stage presence and community building spirit that not that
the poor organising team for LCA doesn't have that, but Jack's a local, he knows how to
speak to an audience and it's been really delightful to see him on stage every morning.
Yeah, for me it's important to know not only what you're good at but what you're also
bad at and to get other people on your team to try and plug those holes.
And I love James and he has a certain presence in a room, but that might not be the sort
of presence that you want when introducing your conference, yeah.
I hope he never hears that.
You don't have many listeners on this conference, though.
No guys, it's just the entire heck of public radio audience, yeah.
Yeah!
A couple thousand, yeah of course.
Now everything is said here is with absolute respect and love and some people have skills
that others don't, but acknowledging that yes these things do come together in the end
and there are some last minute adjustments that happen and everything is volunteer
run.
So the people that do volunteer are loved and appreciated and thanked enormously.
But LCA is that kind of community where you can come together and it's an annual gathering
of like minds and it's a great way to kick off the year of open-source CNC things.
Seeing just people turn up just behind me at the coffee carts and seeing all the lanyards
slowly coming out of bags even after the exuberance of the penguin dinner last night.
It's like, we're on the second last day, but people are still really happy to be here.
Yeah, because I sort of feel that there's certainly more with the software, there's a feeling
that like, if you're not good at something then it's not important, but if you're not
good at documenting stuff, if you're not good at user interface stuff or user experience
stuff, it's not important rather than realising that it's important and I'm not the person
to do it, could somewhat and then go about ways about finding it out.
So similarly with the conference, the thing that I always go back to for me personally
is I always get asked when helping to organise things.
What have you done for the Hallway Track and it's like, I don't care about the Hallway
Track, I come to conferences till it's into the talks, I don't come with a conference
to socialise, so I make sure that somebody else on whatever team that I'm helping with
is looking after the Hallway Track.
Just because the Hallway Track is not important to me doesn't mean it's not important to other
people, so it's about recognising what things actually need to be there and if you don't
care about it, that's totally fine, but other people might well care about it.
Yeah, I believe the great Michael Davies said there are three things you need at every
conference, you need a venue, you need speakers and you need an audience.
Anything else is just years of adding layers and complexity that yes, it's really great
and really helpful, but people in this community will self-organise if that particular thing
isn't there, except for AVA being kind of important, you can't exactly self-organise AV on
the spot, but Hallway tracks and just having a wiki up and then people self-organise around
that or having, okay, that's the quiet room, that's the Hallway Track, here's where
the power is and people will organically sort of make the spaces happen.
And it is that sort of community where people realise that if they do something, then it
gets done.
Yeah.
And hopefully we don't burn out any particular people who might want to come back and
help again in a more official capacity in later years.
So are you speaking this year?
I can't say.
Oh.
I spoke at a mini-con.
Yes.
But there may or may not be a slot open today that may not be filled by me that hasn't
been announced yet at time of recording.
Gotcha.
So the mini-conference is, so we have three days of the main conference and it's a regular
star conference where people put in paper, excuse me, people put in paper proposals and
a paper team goes over those proposals and picks the in-air quotes the best papers.
But the mini-conference are a couple of days beforehand where members in the community
get to run their own little mini-conferences.
And somewhat surprisingly to myself, this year is the first year that actually helped
run a mini-conference.
In previous years, all my interactions with mini-conferences was getting incredibly
frustrated at how disorganized and mismanages the mini-confer organizers were from a main
conference organizer, organizational standpoint.
So yeah, I think for me, the mini-conference thing this year worked reasonably well.
It was really interesting because the software that we're using to manage it, it's gotten
a lot better over the years, but there's still some issues with delegation of privileges.
So I couldn't actually check to see if our mini-conference speakers had paid and registered.
I had to ask, unfortunately, because of the way that things stand out, I ended up having
to ask the core conference organizers whether or not that had happened because the main
software person has been sick the last couple of weeks, so she couldn't answer those questions.
So it went up the org chart, so there were a lot of things that happened very quickly
once I asked for them, but the communication in the last few days was a bit hectic.
It's that sort of thing where in the week leading up to the conference, everything is hitting
the fan, and the poor conference organizers have a feeling of a million and one of questions.
So I'm out in a request to the organizers to be able to do these interviews, and I've
got an automated ticket back from their ticketing system, and the ticket number I got was
like 1,400 and something or other, which means that they probably had to deal with 1,400
other requests before my request to do some recording.
So they were dealing with a lot of requests in the last few days leading up to things.
So I don't envy them that.
And obviously the less than out of all of this is making sure that your ticket numbers
aren't increment, or so you don't expose how much it's lost during when a email from
last week has a ticket number 1,400 email from this week has a ticket number 3,000.
Yeah.
So the thing that the unexpected thing that worked really nicely for me this year is that
the keynote for the overall conference on the day of my mini conference was all about how
thinking about open source has helped an entirely different domain improve the way that
they do things.
So this was the Open Malaria keynote.
And for me that was really, really good because going into our mini-conf, all of...
Do you want to mention about mini-conf as well?
Yeah.
So going into our mini-conf, which was about the intersection between the glam industries
and open source and glam is an acronym for galleries, libraries, archives and museums.
So it was really interesting that we had a really good keynote about the Open Source
Malaria project first up and then we move into our mini-conf, which is all about trying
to bring some open source thoughts, ideas, principles into other industries.
So that was a very unexpected event, but yeah, it's one of those things where everything
sort of comes together on the day that you weren't really expecting.
So you may or may not be speaking, gosh, that's mysterious.
I did do a mini-conf talk.
Yep.
I was the last lightning talk in the Art and Tech mini-conf, which was an entire day of
software and hardware art bits.
So we had a talk about the iterative processes of doing 3D printing and mock-ups with
falsehood in two separate talks.
We had a few different talks talking about actual artists using software to make things
with neural networks, a lady who made an interactive tablecloth.
We had a lady speaking about a crochet coral reef, which was an art installation, and
I just did a little talk about how I made the mistake in 2014 saying I'd make a bit
of software and then in 2018 actually made it.
So I released a project which allows you to take images and turn them into cross-stitch
charts.
But that was a really amazing day where it was just an entire room full of people making
art with software and open source stuff.
And I don't think there's been a mini-conf quite like that before.
It's really interesting because I think a lot of modern tech people don't understand
or realise where some of the fundamentals of computers came from and not realising
that programmed looms way back when.
One of the first forms of modern computing that we've got.
LCA in Jalong had most of the talk tracks were being held in Deakin University, but
one of the tracks was held in the Wool Museum which had a jacquard loom and walking up the
ramp to the offsite venue we had just looking at this amazing machine.
It was awesome.
If you haven't seen a jacquard loom before, look up videos of it in action on various video
streaming websites and other sources of information because it's just seeing that sort of machinery
in action with its programmability is an outstanding testament to human ingenuity.
And for memory that one was sort of programmed like a piano where it's got a paper tape that
gets fed it into it and there are holes in that tape and the presence or absence of
those holes means that the weft goes underneath the shuttlecock threads so that the patterns
can be created in a repeatable manner.
And from memory this particular pattern was looped around in a way that would be continuous
so you set off the machine and it would just create an everlasting pattern so you could
get really long pieces of material happening without human intervention saving how many
hours of labor if you would have tried to do it by hand but also creating some amazing
art.
It was quite cool and I may have been late to one talk because I was distracted looking
at it once maybe, I think it was twice anyway.
Yeah, there have been some discussions about some of the minicolts being clashed in time
totaling with each other so particularly the art minicolts clashing with some of the
glam ones.
Yeah but that's okay because there just happens to be an overlap in these different things
that I did see the redacted dress popping up on Twitter which was great because I held
the pockets box which I advertised both to the open glam minicolts and the art and tech
minicolts where I'm in one of those great situations where I live in the city that
LCA is hosted so I could go home every night and I could bring in the next day a sewing
machine and we spent a break time adding pockets to things so that was really great.
We're holding that again today.
Excellent, cool.
Because sewing machines are cool but even when you have the overlap between tracks having
the live communication set have organically formed around Twitter there's no, well I believe
there is a matrix and all this sort of stuff but using Twitter and having various conference
hashtags we've been able to work out that oh there is a talk happening in this minicolp
and there is a talk happening in this minicolp and there happened to be related so let
us join these two tracks together in a hallway session which is one of the great things that
happens when you have all these life-minded people communicating together across a venue
because I don't think that literally a whole bunch of people turning up outside a talk
room adding pockets to things would have happened if not for the wonderfulness of open communication.
So we're about ten minutes away from the first keynote so I think I'll let you go.
Yes, today's keynote is going to be wonderful.
It's Hugh Blending's who has a very long history with LCA and LA and he was my the president
on the year that I was on council so I'd be I'm going to be in the front row to be listening
intently about what he has to say to the audience at large.
So you are also the head organiser for Python Australia in Sydney for the next two years.
For the next two years I have no idea what I was thinking, what did you sign the up for?
Which is obviously something near and dear to my heart because four years ago now I was
the organiser of Python Australia back in Brisbane.
And when your icon organising in 2015 was my first Python and now organising it so.
So obviously did something right.
So yeah I imagine we'll have you back again to talk about that.
So thank you very much this morning for your thoughts on the conference so far.
No worries thanks for having me.
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