OSGeo stand at Linux Australia conference

I've just come off the OSGeo stand at Linux Australia. Behind the stand were:

• Tim Bowden
• Milton Lofberg
• Antel (sp?)
  
• Myself

Data
Every second person at the stand asked about data, to which we explained that there is very limited "free" data in Australia. Many of the participants were excited by the idea of an Open Street Map idea and said they would be keen to enter data if the project existed in Australia.
Education
There were a few teachers and lecturers who came past. The guy I talked to said he used the ESRI stack for teaching. It was noted that if people are to use the Open Source stack then we need to start at the educational institutions. Teachers in this area should feed their notes back into the OSGeo Education group.
Proprietary verses Open Stack
There were a significant number of questions from users of the proprietary stack about equivalent applications for their current ESRI product. I used Arron Raciot's slide which shows a comparison between stacks a number of times. This slide should be converted into a handout and/or poster.
Packaging
A guy from Red Hat offered his help to package up the Geospatial stack for the Red Had distribution. Apparently we need to look into "yum".
A guy from Gentoo showed me that QGIS is already being packaged for Gentoo. To get other packages included, we should add a bug report and set up a list of dependencies and documentation.
Wearable Computing
We chatting for a bit with Wayne Piekarski about wearable computing. He had some very sexy stuff. Wearing Virtual Reality glasses he could walk around an area and mix real backgrounds with virtual objects. There are opportunities to work with OSGeo here but we did not get much time to talk details before the crowds came and we had to go back to our tables.