在本次大會的主會場開始之前，還會有一個專門針對女性用戶的小會場，主持人是www.javarach.com的創始人Kathy Sierra。她同時還是Sun公司的高級培訓人員。
Linuxchix小型會議的組織者Mary Gardiner告訴Builder澳洲網站的記者說，以前，女性計算機從業人員總是認為自己沒有參加過開源項目的建設，自己也就沒有權利參加開源的線下交流活動。
Linuxchix小型會議的發言人都是女性，而且討論的大部分話題都和女性有關，但是主題還是有關開源社區的建設問題。參加會議的人性別不限 ：)
More than 50 women have signed up to the traditionally male dominated event, which represents approximately 10% of the overall number of registrations.
Helping to boost the female ranks is a mini-conference being staged before the main conference starts and the announcement of the first ever female keynote speaker, Kathy Sierra, book author, master trainer at Sun Microsystems and founder of www.javaranch.com.
Mary Gardiner, Linuxchix mini-conference organiser, told Builder AU most of the women at the mini-conference who haven't attended before "seem to have felt that they don't have a right to be part of a Free Software community event, usually because they are not heavily involved in Free Software development."
"Having a community event hosted by LinuxChix, which is a group for users as well as for developers, seems to have helped", Gardiner added.
Talks covered at next year's LinuxChix mini-conference event include "Closing the Gender Pay Gap One Salary at a Time", "Is Free Software a Macho thing? Women and FOSS", and "Social networking for fun and profit".
The Linuxchix mini-conference will have women-only speakers but is open to all delegates to attend.
BuilderAU will be covering LCA when it is held between 15th and 20th January 2007.
