Conference season for 2012 kicks off in Melbourne on the weekend of January 14, with the Drupal Downunder conference being held in the Jasper Hotel — there’s sure to be PHP and hooks galore.

Commencing on Monday January 16, linux.conf.au, the country’s largest free and open-source conference, swings into gear until January 20. The venue for 2012 is the University of Ballarat, with keynote speakers including Bruce Perens, Tor Project’s Jacob Appelbaum and executive director of GNOME Karen Sandler.

The month wraps up with Australasian Computer Science Week 2012 at RMIT in Melbourne. To say that ACSW sessions are diverse is an understatement; take a look at the program to see what I mean.

If you couldn’t make it to Canberra for OSDC 2011, videos of the sessions are beginning to appear on the conference site’s schedule, or can be viewed directly on YouTube — I’ve watched a few so far, and the quality is satisfactory, even if the camera angle is occasionally a bit crazy in order to get the speaker and their slides into a single shot.