Scott Penrose, along with the team that created the first OSDC in 2004 Australia, is the creator of the Open Source Developers' Conference and subsequent Club concept.

He started by taking up the concept of a YAPC::Au (Yet another perl conference, Australia). This expanded to include PHP, then Python and the OSDC was born.

The idea worked so well that it was run again in 2005 and taken up by individuals in that conference for adoption in Israel and Taiwan. The realisation that OSDC had just become global was inspiring and in 2006 the OSDC elected to start moving it around the country. 2007 was held in Brisbane, 2008 in Sydney, 2009 in Brisbane again, before returning in 2010 to Melbourne. 2011 will be held in Canberra.

Scott has designed many large scale internet systems from instant chat, large enterprise directories, ISP services, Learning management systems, Virtual learning environments, and more. He has built an full mail system including SMTP, POP and Webmail that has been in production for almost 11 years (recently the webmail component has been replaced - and Scott's dream is that the system is entirely replaced as his 1996 code is getting a little old). The mail service runs in over 8000 schools with well over a million users. The learning management system, desktop, portfolio and class room systems that Scott designed and developed with a group of dedicated developers is used in those same schools.

More recently he has started Zaltana.org - a presentation and authentication management system for web applications that is language and implementation independent, which has been taken up by Editure and a number of other projects.

Scott is a keen Glider Pilot and has joint released XCSoar - a competition and glide computer for use inside the glider. It is written in C++ and uses some very advanced techniques to map, log, display and predict gliding conditions.