LibrePlanet: Conference/2014/Lightning Talks

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10:55 - 12:35 on Saturday, 3/22 | Room 32-144 | Facilitator: Donald Robertson

Lightning talks are five-minute presentations given by conference attendees on free software topics they're passionate about.

If you would like to give a talk, please add a title, short description and (optionally) your name to the time slot you'd like below. You'll also be able to sign up at the conference, if there are spots remaining.

Please make sure your lightning talks are about free software-related issues and projects, and don't advocate proprietary software or Services as a Software Substitute (SaaSS). There are many conferences focused on "open source," but we're proud that people come to LibrePlanet to be part of the free software movement. In your presentations, please use the term "free software" rather than "open source" to help us keep LibrePlanet focused on computer user freedom as an ethical social movement. We appreciate it, and your audience will too.

To ensure a conference that's safe and fun for everyone, we take our anti-harassment policy very seriously. We'd appreciate it if you looked it over before planning your presentation.

You're welcome to bring a slide deck, as long as it works without requiring proprietary software. We recommend PDF or the .odp format readable by LibreOffice Impress. If you are using slides, please bring them to the lightning talk facilitator before you plan to talk, to save time during the presentations. The lightning talks won't be streamed. If you'd like to suggest a topic, but not necessarily give a talk, you're welcome to make a suggestion on the Discussion area for this page.

Our tips for an awesome lightning talk:

• Be as selective as possible with what you cover. (In our experience, a 5-minute talk cannot cover what a 15-minute talk covers and still be effective.)
• Use a large, reader-friendly font for all your slides.
• Keep your number of slides low and take care not to visually overload them.

Sign up!

To sign up, please sign in to this wiki or make an account with the links in the upper right of this Web page, then click Edit and add you talk title and your name (optional) to an unclaimed time slot.

Session 1: 10:55 - 11:40

• 10:55 - 11:10: Introductions, giving slides to facilitator

• Talk 1 title: Catrobat: A free mobile visual programming language that promotes the free software philosophy among kids and teens on a massive, world-wide scale.
  • Short description: Catrobat (AGPL 3.0'ed) is a visual programming language inspired by MIT's Scratch but independently developed and entirely running on smartphones and tablets --- no Laptop or PC whatsoever is needed to develop or execute Catrobat programs. Kids share and remix their self-programmed apps through our website, and the programs created and uploaded by kids are also released under the AGPL 3.0. Catrobat programs run on all major smartphone platforms including FirefoxOS, with the Android version (called Pocket Code) already freely available on Google Play (other platform versions are still alpha). Google is heavily promoting Pocket Code in their Google Play for Education program where it is the only programming system for schools available directly on Android tablets, and Catrobat was just chosen for the fourth time as a mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code. Catrobat has also been chosen as the official programming system on the OLPC Android tablets, with our own app-icon on the main screen. More than 250 volunteers from more than 20 nations have worked together to bring Catrobat to life. Pocket Code allows to program just using one's thumb, and a first app can be created in less than one minute. I will demo Pocket Code live during my talk (takes only a few seconds!).

• Talk 2 title: Denying our software and services to all persons involved in privacy violations and mass surveillance.
  • Short description: Faced with the unexpected extent of the international dragnet type privacy violations and the mass surveillance scandal that came to light last year thanks to Edward Snowden, including the ubiquitous compromising of soft- and hardware (absolute must-see: Jacob Applebaum's talk from December 30 at the Chaos Communication Congress), as well as the felt impotence even of seasoned security experts confronted with this situation, and the often weak and half-assed formulations of legal responses of the concerned communities, some of which sound as if they were co-written by the NSA, our free software project has decided to take action and deny its software and services to all persons involved in these privacy violations and mass surveillance. The legal text is intricate but airtight, and I will describe our strategy and hope to discuss it with other participants at the conference.
  • Speaker name: Wolfgang Slany

• Talk 3 title: Building a For-Profit Business Based on Free-software Model.
  • Short description: I'm a Free software End-user/supporter working a Project to launch my Tech-Startup here in the Silicon Valley before June 2015. The Business Model will be founded on Free software principles. After spending years in the Proprietary software world, I'm disillusioned by the fakeness of the Proprietary software Model. Like the immense popularity of GNU/Linux has shown, Free-software products are generally superior to Proprietary software; Also there is no shortage of talented developers in the Free-software world; yet they are not very well adopted in the Business world because there is a perceived 'Brand-Equity' problem with Free-software. Based on my experience, we can correct this perception if we can show Business-value by stitching an end-to-end software ecosystem instead of isolated/one-off software pieces. And this is the mission of my Business Project. My goal in attending 2014 LibrePlanet is to network with committed developers who would want to see greater adoption of Free Software in Businesses (especially SMBs) by combining with my Business-experience to write Custom Business Software and in the process make some money.
  • Speaker name: Mrinal Sarkar

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Waiting list (add your talk here if the session is already full):

Session 2: 11:50 - 12:35

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• Talk 5 title: ProteanOS: Liberating Embedded Systems
  • Short description: ProteanOS is a fully-free BusyBox/Linux-libre distribution configurable for a wide variety of embedded systems. This self-hosting binary distribution is developed from scratch with inspiration from other projects like Debian and OpenEmbedded.
  • Speaker name: P. J. McDermott

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• 12:25 - 12:35: Wrap up

Waiting list (add your talk here if the session is already full):