Hi Andrew,
I've been meaning to submit a talk proposal for OSHCamp for two years now, so I better do it quick before I forget again :)
I am an interaction designer who works for OpenEmbedded, the embedded Linux build system (
openembedded.org). This is probably a weird sentence, but in a good way. Over the past 4 years OpenEmbedded has put a lot of effort into improving the ease of use of their tools by bringing in user-centered design approaches.
The result of those efforts is something called Toaster, a web interface to the OpenEmbedded build system that makes remarkably easy to produce custom Linux distributions for your favourite boards. Well, as "remarkably easy" as something like this can be ;)
The idea would be demoing Toaster, showing how to compile your own Linux distribution from source with it, and using the activity to introduce the core concepts of OpenEmbedded. I will hopefully also debunk some myths about the build system in the process. OpenEmbedded is "infamous" for being terribly slow and fiendishly complicated. Some of the things I will show in this talk might somehow contribute towards changing that perception.