For someone whose job suddenly disappeared on him, Auckland software developer Vik Olliver is on a high. Apart from his employment misfortune, good things have been happening to Olliver, a stalwart of the open source software community in New Zealand.

For one, he has a new job, courtesy of Wellington company Catalyst IT, one of whose directors, Don Christie, is president of the New Zealand Open Source Society. Christie and Olliver were vying for the presidency earlier in the year and Christie won.

For another, the thrill of rubbing shoulders with leading lights of the international open source movement at their annual convention, OSCON, in the United States is still a recent memory.

And last, and most memorably, Olliver has been shooting the breeze with many of the world's top thinkers and doers in the fields of science, technology and culture at an "unconference" in California. He attended Science Foo Camp, an event sponsored by Nature Publishing Group, organised - or not, which is the whole point - by technology publisher O'Reilly Media (which also staged OSCON) and hosted over a weekend last month by Google at its California complex.

Olliver found himself among the 200 invited luminaries by virtue of his open source interest. For most people that means software but Olliver's preoccupation is open source hardware.

With a scattering of like-minded people around the world, Olliver is trying to develop a machine that will replicate itself, called a RepRap (for self-replicating rapid prototyper). Connected to a computer, the RepRap will function like a 3D printer, producing components, initially from molten plastic, that can be assembled into anything for which it is programmed - including itself.

As the open source ethos dictates, the design of the RepRap, and software for driving it, will be freely available, making it an invaluable tool in the developing world where manufactured goods are unaffordable for many people.

Olliver took a prototype RepRap with him to OSCON and Sci Foo, where it was "a great crowd-puller". At Sci Foo, he encountered Hod Lipson, an assistant professor of mechanical and space engineering at Cornell University, whose Fab@Home project has similar goals.

But by no means everyone at Sci Foo was a technologist.

"It's quite an amazing thing," Olliver says. "You turn up there, 200 of you, and meet and greet and get to know one another, grab your swag bag and so forth. Then they wheel on these three large whiteboards, which are divided up into slots, and say, 'there you are chaps, organise your conference'."