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!