Last week I rep­res­en­ted the Wel­ling­tonista at the New Zea­l­and Open Source Awards. The Masked Bar­fly had been whis­per­ing in my ear stor­ies of organ­isa­tion­al fail­ure in an attempt to make me wor­ried that I would­n’t get any­thing to eat, but apart from a press release announ­cing “Annie McCar­ron” as the win­ner of the People’s Choice award (not our beloved Amie then?), it was a lovely night.

The even­ing began with “cock­tails” and canapes in the foy­er out­side the ball­room at the Inter­con­tin­ent­al. The food was lovely – the duck crepes espe­cially, but people really need to stop writ­ing “cock­tails” when they mean “wine and beer” – we talked about this already, remem­ber? And the foy­er lay­out was a little badly planned, with the jazz trio block­ing half the path between the badge table and the booze. This was not a UX con­ven­tion, appar­ently. Any­way, it’s always inter­est­ing to see large groups of inter­net types assembled in one place, and see the curi­ous over­lap between day jobs and pas­sion. That’s like, pas­sion for open source, not the oth­er kind.

You can of course read about all the win­ners else­where, so I’m going to talk about super­fi­cial things from the night instead. Mark Cubey was the MC, and did a fine job, espe­cially since he quoted my tweet about the night being a saus­age fest in his open­ing speech (I found my girls after tweet­ing that). The ball­room was decked out pretty enough, with glow­ing lights on every table, and screens scrolling through the spon­sors’ names. The wines were a Trin­ity Hill Syrah, and some Mal­bor­ough Sav I for­get the name of, though waiters brought people Per­oni and oth­er beers if they asked for them. The biggest sur­prise on the night though, was the “altern­at­ive drop”. Each table had a menu on it that lis­ted a chick­en option and a beef option (those with diet­ary restric­tions needed to sing out on RSVP), and I figured at some stage we’d be asked what we wanted. Instead, waiters plonked down plates in front of us, altern­at­ing chick­en and beef, and it was the same with dessert, altern­at­ing chocol­ate mousse and lem­on tart. Every­one at Table GNU seemed happy enough with what they got at ran­dom, but I still thought it was a strange way to do things. Have you ever exper­i­enced that before? Can someone in the hos­pit­al­ity industry clue us in to the rationale behind it?

Any­way, the food of course was­n’t the focus – the good work that’s been done in Open Source was, and it was a lovely thing to see people get­ting their well-deserved recog­ni­tion. Thanks for hav­ing us, NZOSA!