Nathan Torkington on 3 lightning keynotes:

1) Lessons learnt!

‘Technology solves problems’… no it doesn’t, its all about the meatsacks!

‘If you live a good life you’ll never have to care about marketing’… steer the meatsacks

‘English is an imperative language for controlling meatsacks.’… Tell the smart meatsacks what you want (english is declarative).

2) Open source in New Zealand:

A bit of a satire ‘Sheep calculator’, tatoos as circuit diagrams. The reserve bank apparently has a *working* water-economy-simulator. Shades of Terry Pratchett!

3) Predictions – more satire about folk that make predictions – financial analysts, science journalists.

After that, it was lightning talk time. I’ve just grabbed some highlights.

Selena Deckelmann talked about going to Ondo in Nigeria and un-rigging an election:

1. Run for political office.
2. Lose – but polls had suggested the reverse result
3. Don’t give up – protest file May 14 2007
4. Use technology – fingerprint scanning – 84814 duplicate fingerprints, 360 exactly the same fingerprints
5. Patience – 2 years and the courts reversed the election

http://flossmanuals.net – nice friendly manuals in many languages writen at book sprints.

Kate Olliver presented on making an origami penguin.

Mark Osbourne presented ‘Open Source School’ – a school in New Zealand that has gone completely open source, even though the NZ school system pays microsoft 10Million/year for a country wide license.