The mini confs have been announced. These are the one day conferences within a conference.
full announcement

They're all excellent FOSS topics, and in amongst these are some favourites that I'm really looking forward to.

The Education miniconf will be run by Tabitha Roder, the person i picked as my hero for Ada Lovelace day. She's also a moodle ninja and sensei by day, and the leader of OLPC/Sugar open source work in New Zealand. The Wellington "Friends in Testing" group has been growning from strength to strength this year, and now meets every Saturday to test the latest build. Education, of both the young and the not-so-young is one way the free and open source worlde grows and bring in fresh ideas from new people. It's also a much nicer community than some other parts of open source.

The "Free the Cloud" miniconf will be run by Evan Prodromou, most famous for founding and building http://identi.ca and the Laconica software behind it. He also wrote the Open Micro Blogging specification. "Cloud" is a common buzz word these days, but it's a real concept (once we agree on what it means). Licences like the AGPL (the William Wallace of open source licences) are unlocking code for the world to reuse and build apon.

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, "an international day of blogging to draw
attention to women excelling in technology".

http://findingada.com/

To take part
All you need to do is sign the pledge, pick your tech heroine and then publish your blog post any time on Tuesday 24th March 2009. It doesn’t matter how new or old your blog is, what gender you are, what language you blog in, or what you normally blog about - everyone is invited.

Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper was a computer scientist and United States Naval officer.

She developed the first compiler for a computer programming language.

Because of the breadth of her accomplishments and her naval rank, she is sometimes referred to as "Amazing Grace".

In the 1970s, she pioneered the implementation of standards for testing computer systems and components, most significantly for early programming languages such as FORTRAN and COBOL. The Navy tests for conformance to these standards led to significant convergence among the programming language dialects of the major computer vendors. In the 1980s, these tests (and their official administration) were assumed by the National Bureau of Standards (NBS), known today as the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).