Program

For forty years, the free software movement has been driven by a passionate community of hackers who care deeply about user freedom and privacy. Meanwhile, the strategies and tools that other software communities use to organize, promote, and execute projects has changed significantly.

In this talk, we will discuss how to cultivate a welcoming community that attracts a new generation of passionate users, contributors, and maintainers to free software projects. I will take inspiration from other successful projects to illustrate a human-centered process that streamlines contributions, strengthens maintainership, and creates a feeling of shared ownership for all users.

This workshop aims to create an interactive space for free software supporters as well as representatives of community organizations to collaborate and exchange with each others. The participants will share their experiences with working with community organizations. Together, we will brainstorm solutions to bring more technological freedom and independence, privacy and free software collaborative practices into the community sector. I will present the results of a needs assessment postdoctoral project (Fall 2023) in which I interviewed almost 50 Canadian community organizations, listing their technological challenges and needs. We will thinker solutions related to improving community organizations' data management and privacy, collaborative practices, migration to free software platforms, and continuous training.

This presentation is about Raspberry Pi and the progress on liberating the boot firmware for it. I will talk about why it's important to have free boot firmware on Raspberry Pi and look at its technical details. We will look at the boot firmware librerpi: its status, how it all started and we will also look at its demos.

Nowadays, proprietary/non-free software has become nearly synonymous with educational establishments. Using software that is "the norm" or "industry standard" forces students to submit to proprietary applications "for the good of their future." Tools for textbook access and homework assignment/submission force students to submit to subscription-based DRM models and forfeit any opportunity to own the knowledge contained within the textbooks. Big name companies, some of which are the biggest proponents of proprietary software, are considered the best on resumes, and students are encouraged to search for jobs at such conglomerates. GNU@NU, Northeastern's free software organization is here to help! We will be holding a discussion on student experiences with free software, as they pertain to anything remotely educational. Come join us to help and learn more!

My love for freedom brought me to free software. Free software came with free licenses, like the GPL, that was used for the RepRap project. I have assimilated a lot from that project, and modifying a 3D printer I realized a coreXY meditation table.

In non-web applications, accessibility has long been confined to only a handful of the largest, most well-resourced UI toolkits, leaving a large proportion of free software inaccessible to disabled people. AccessKit aims to solve this problem by providing an accessibility abstraction and glue layer that can be reused by many toolkits across programming languages. Our aim is to do for accessibility what libraries such as SDL have done for graphics, input, and windowing. This talk will cover what we've accomplished so far, what's next, and how the community can help.

Free software entrepreneurship offers a wealth of opportunities, from reduced barriers to entry to community collaboration and market expansion; however, it comes with its set of obstacles, including monetization challenges, licensing complexities, competition, community management, and ongoing maintenance. How to establish a successful free software business by empowering customers with freedom, self-sustenance, and complete control, and at the same time explore business opportunities.

Software Freedom Day has been a rather niche event, but inside the FOSS community it was a household brand a decade ago. While it has been on the decline over the last 10 years, today the event is more important than ever in the movement to further Software Freedom. In this talk, I will explain why.

This workshop aims to create an interactive space for free software supporters as well as representatives of community organizations to collaborate and exchange with each others. The participants will share their experiences with working with community organizations. Together, we will brainstorm solutions to bring more technological freedom and independence, privacy and free software collaborative practices into the community sector. I will present the results of a needs assessment postdoctoral project (Fall 2023) in which I interviewed almost 50 Canadian community organizations, listing their technological challenges and needs. We will thinker solutions related to improving community organizations' data management and privacy, collaborative practices, migration to free software platforms, and continuous training.

Your data are essential to your life, your agency, and your future. Come learn how to save, serve, and safely share your data at home with a smorgasbord of free software. I'll cover rapid setup and basic use of tools such as Traefik, Nextcloud, Wallabag, Jellyfin, and more. With these powerful and private services at your disposal, you can collaboratively edit documents in realtime online, stream music and video, and future-proof your digital assets.

This talk pairs well with a soon-to-be released book of the same topic and title. Both the book and talk are about self-hosting free software, were created with free software, and are free software themselves.

Nonfree software subjugates users. That's wrong enough, but such power is now used to wrong users even harder. The easier it is for third parties to impose on a user their choice of software version the more they can twiddle the software's behavior to best serve themselves and enshittify the user's computing. This holds for dominant (nonfree) operating systems for workstations and mobiles, with their mandatory updates, but users become even more vulnerable to enshittification by using web apps downloaded at every use from somebody else's servers, by doing their computing through somebody else's services, and by using remotely controlled and remotely mediated smartIoT devices and appliances. Even when using software that's not updated automatically on their own computers, users (and their upstream distributors) may be persuaded to adopt enshittif(ied/ying?) versions, including CPU microcode and firmware for system initialization and for peripheral devices. Is using free software enough to escape?

The collaborative spirit of the free software and hacker movements lends itself to writing fiction as well. I write free culture fantasy stories with free software tools. Crafting characters and settings that can be used freely by other authors and artists promotes creativity and is a useful way of teaching people about the principles of freedom.

Since I use plain text and a Git-based workflow, anyone can freely read, modify, and share my stories. They can learn from edits I have made or propose improvements. Plain text formats like Markdown and Shanty make writings portable across most computers.

We can create a storytelling community that allows cross-pollination between creators and disciplines (e.g., novels, songs, and video games) and changes us from consumers to creators.

Learn how I use GNU/Linux in my classroom. See how students use the Command Line Interface (CLI) to perform network exploration tasks. Lessons on Bash and Python coding will also be discussed. There will also be examination of emerging trends in high school computer science.

Using OpenProject as an example, this talk explores how to delve into a completely alien codebase written in a language that you've never used to make changes that you want. This is a practical use of software freedom.

We will walk through all the steps from "I just installed this software" all the way through becoming familiar with the codebase and developing an understanding of the language. On the way we will discuss when it makes sense to take shortcuts and when it makes sense to actually do the hard work. We'll end with a live demo.