AUUG treasurer, Gordon Hubbard, said the conference had to date attracted an 18 percent increase in registrations and a 36 percent increase in sponsorship funding over the previous year's event. He declined, however, to release actual figures for either.
Hubbard said he attributed the rise to "a general feeling the information technology economy is picking up" combined with strong interest in open standards and open source software, particularly in the government sector.
He said there was likely to be a brief board meeting during the Melbourne event, but that was more likely to deal with immediate conference matters than long-term planning and governance issues.
AUUG president David Purdue yesterday conceded the organisation needed to reverse the decline in membership, although he denied remarks from his predecessor the AUUG board had considered winding the group up.
Hubbard said AUUG had secured David Oram, infrastructure planner, from Centrelink, to discuss Linux and identity management at the social services organisation.
Other speakers at the conference include Sun Microsystems chief technology officer Angus McDonald, AT&T Fellow Steve Bellovin (who will be discussing privacy, anonymity and security on the Internet), OpenBSD project lead Theo de Raadt and Steve Alford, general manager, sourcing and security branch, the Australian Government Information Management Office.
The full conference program can be found here.
