Program

WorldVistA EHR is a slightly modified version of the Department of Veterans Affairs Electronic Health Record, VistA. VistA is currently in the process of being replaced by Oracle Cerner by the VA, but implementation of the new system is currently on hold because it is not preforming up to expectations. Meanwhile, VistA is in use in many places internationally, with the largest implementation in the country of Jordan. The largest implementation in the U.S. is at Central Regional Hospital, a state mental health hospital in North Carolina. It will fall upon the free software community to keep this comprehensive free software EHR available in the future.

The RISC-V architecture and ecosystem have undergone tremendous growth recently. We will take a look at the current state of RISC-V and its current deployment footprint. We'll discuss where RISC-V may be headed and the role it may play in completely open and free datacenter servers, tablets, and cellphones. We will review the emergence of the ARM architecture and how in may be an important stepping stone to a free computing platform. We'll discuss the differences between the ARM licensing model and the X86_64 architecture licensing model as well as the role of ARM processors in cell phones and cloud datacenters (such as AWS). Finally, we'll take a brief look at some options for starting RISC-V free and open hardware development for both experienced FPGA programmers and newbies. We'll explain options including physical RISC-V processors, FPGAs, and software emulation.

In their pursuit to turn a beautiful document publishing system into a modern web browsers have become incredibly complex, to the extent that it becomes impractical to exercise your software freedoms to study, modify, share, & share your modifications. Even once all dominant engines are nominally free software.

This talk will explore my journey building alternative browser engines, how they can be made appealing despite limited capability, the benefits to the free software ecosystem, and how you can help bring a JavaScript-free web into reality.

There is a great challenge around payment for building platforms and working on free software projects. Sometimes a client will pay for development and other times there are unfunded projects that are built for community use by volunteers. What are some good business models that financially support the developers? Is an infrastructure needed to support payment for working on free software projects? Could OpenCollective be a path for sponsoring multiple development projects for teams of developers?

Seeking dialogue for the expansion of horizons, the communication will present a case study around a system made to assist in the record of hybrid items, such as books that have handwritten dedication, for example, or items with diffuse or multiple definition boundaries, like handwritten correspondence, as they can represent a challenge for custoding institution because they own the potential to elucidate intersubjective intricacies by revealing relationships that individuals establish with their time.

While code generating AI systems like CoPilot have emerged as a powerful tool for professional developers, there are growing legal and ethical concerns around the development of these models. Questions have been raised as to whether these AI models respect current free software licenses---both for model training and generation---and what the social impact of this technology is on the free software community.

The BigCode project is a scientific collaboration (with over 350 participants) working on the responsible development of code generating AI systems. In this talk, we discuss how we navigate the legal-ethics-governance aspects around the development of these models, including how we developed a permissively licensed code dataset, give developers the option to remove their code from the training data, redact personally identifiable information (PII), and attribute generated programs to the original code snippet.

The Nym mixnet is a new privacy infrastructure for an anonymous overlay software to resist mass surveillance. Like a VPN, it is compatible with generic internet apps. In contrast to a VPN and Tor, even a global passive adversary that has a "God’s eye view" cannot determine who sent a message over Nym to whom. We will review the design and codebase, and demonstrate its usage for use-cases such as e-mail and instant messaging, as well as how to run your own mix mode on GNU/Linux to provision privacy - and freedom - for others.

"Open science" is a movement that promotes the freedom to share knowledge and data in science. Its recent success largely depends on our ability to reproduce and then improve on existing research products. It is about ensuring that researchers have sufficient access to information and the necessary tools for analysis. This movement goes hand in hand with the free software movement, as it has the potential to revolutionize sciences by providing powerful tools for data analysis, modeling, and visualization. I would like to focus my talk on the connection and missing links between free software and open science, particularly in environmental and data sciences. The talk is devoted to raising awareness and promoting conversations on how we can better advance sciences with free software and knowledge sharing.

A panel of people who care about software freedom, and have have somewhat recently gone through a job search. They will discuss and share their experience, offer some advice, and involve the audience.

There is a vast array of ways to advance free software while looking after your finances, but in this talk, our focus will be on finding employment doing technical work and issues encountered there.

For example: How much conflict with free software values do you accept in a company and for what price? What about ethical differences between your individual work vs the employer's overall business model?

The famous inventor Zangemann lives in a huge villa high above the city. Adults and children alike love his inventions and are desperate to have them. But then something happens: when Zangemann wants to take another close-up look at his inventions during a walk through the city, a child hits him in the shin with the skateboard. That hurts! Enraged, the inventor makes a momentous decision... The clever girl Ada sees through what is going on. Together with her friends, she forges a plan.

This illustrated children's book tells the story of the famous inventor Zangemann and the girl Ada, a curious tinkerer. Ada begins to experiment with hardware and software, and in the process realizes how crucial it is for her and others to control technology.

Ada & Zangemann will inspire children's interest in tinkering and encourages shaping technology. https://ada.fsfe.org

This presentation is about the use and production of free/libre software by organizations of the Brazilian federal government after some years of public policies to promote the use of free software.

If we look to email as an example, free software made a revolution that is still strong today. Thanks to the protocol definition, the software and the communities around it are able to setup, run and help each other. GNU Taler is a protocol and software that promotes the same revolution in payment methods, where people can participate freely to generate an essential infrastructure for today's society. In this talk we are going to introduce how it works, which are the main components, we will navigate a demonstration and answer why it is different in comparison with other digital payment systems. We will end the session with a roadmap and a guide to join in and contribute.

This talk gives on overview of creating and using libre software to collect language data in Africa. The software has been deployed at https://tuvutepamoja.africa. The challenges and opportunities that libre software presents for countries in Africa undergoing digitization will be discussed.

The hardest part about promoting the free software philosophy is getting people interested enough in the conversation to listen even if they aren't already excited about technology topics. However, most people use software today, yet have complaints and fears about it.

Instead of merely waiting around for the conversation to turn into a discussion about software usage or technology woes and fears, it helps to come up with powerful questions that can turn conversations about anything into conversations about software and why it needs to have the four freedoms, yet still keeping it engaging for all participants so that it is relevant.

This discussion will be about taking topics people like to discuss and turning them into freedom respecting software topics by relating them whatever people are currently talking about using audience supplied examples. These discussions can take place in forums or chat, online or in person.

The Web is used daily by billions. Even so, users are not protected from many threats by default. This presentation will introduce JShelter, a Webextension that helps in returning the browser to users. JShelter builds on top of previous Web privacy and security research. JShelter focuses on fingerprinting prevention, limitations of rich Web APIs, prevention of attacks connected to timing, and learning information about the computer, the browser, the user, and surrounding physical environment and location. JShelter provides a fingerprinting report and other feedback that can be used by future security research. Thousands of users around the world use the extension every day.

Farmers large and small in the U.S. are being crushed under the thumb of “BigAg” equipment makers whose late model farm machinery combines sensors, always-on Internet connections, software and Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) to vacuum up and monetize proprietary farm data, while simultaneously preventing farmers from being able to service and repair their own equipment. Farmers who own late model equipment today are required to patronize “authorized” technicians at the expense of independent repair and are forced to pay astronomical prices for even routine maintenance. What’s needed is a way to free farmers from the grip of these monopolies with free software and usurious OEM-operated software ecosystems. This panel will bring together experts on farming and farm equipment, embedded device security and policy (e.g. right to repair) to discuss ways to liberate farmers with free software.

This talk will begin by shining some light on the vastness of Wikipedia's technology landscape and the technical community behind it, supporting the development of projects in many different areas to set the room for understanding the need and role of developer advocacy for such a large community. It will then focus on the developer advocacy's role in engaging the technical community behind Wikipedia and its sister projects, for example, through dedicated FOSS outreach, mentoring programs and events, awards and ceremonies for developer recognition, grants and partnerships, community metrics and health, platforms and services, developer portal, and more. Through this talk, the audience will gain insights into what a good return on investment means for such initiatives in nonprofit organizations and gather new ideas for building stronger developer communities.

The ushin project explores Org mode for peer-to-peer deliberation. Ushin offers the seven shapes (or kinds of meaning) deliberative structure for mutual understanding by distinguishing facts, feelings, needs, thoughts, topics, actions, and people. When communicating over the hyperdrive peer-to-peer network, you have full control over your data. With no central authority to censor "misinformation," decision-making power is distributed. A subjective moderation system inspired by TrustNet makes it easy to find sources
of information you can trust. Org mode is already an effective tool for organizing personal knowledge, and we want to use it to deliberate collective issues. Ushin combines these ideas into a fun and easy-to-use plain-text system for discussing important issues free of censorship, bots, and trolls through community curation.