LibrePlanet: Conference/2013/Sessions
March 23rd-24th 2013 in Cambridge, MA
With some events on the evening of Friday the 22nd
About | Full Program (PDF) | Photos | Video | Speakers | Schedule | Session descriptions | Transportation and lodging | Anti-harassment policy
This schedule is subject to change as conference plans are finalized.
Friday, March 22
5:30 - 7:00 PM: Evening meet and greet at the FSF offices, 51 Franklin St., 5th floor, Boston, MA 02110
7:15 pm: Women in Free Software Networking Dinner:
Chau Chow City 83 Essex St (Parking on street) Boston, MA 02111 http://chauchowcity.com/
Contact Libby to RSVP!
Saturday, March 23
8:15 - Registration and breakfast.
Opening Plenary: Idealism for Community Building by Karen Sandler followed by John Sullivan
9:00 AM Lecture Hall A
It was plastered all over the news: the GNOME project was dead. There were forks. So why, in a tough economy, did GNOME got more donations from individuals in 2012 than in any previous year? Why were its outreach efforts to bring in newcomers more successful? In sum, big ideas on how to make the world a better place through software.
Saturday Hackathon Begins
The hackathon will continue for the duration of the conference, with break during plenaries.
Saturday Morning Sessions
10:20 AM
Talk title TBD (D)
Kat Walsh
Lecture Hall A
Right to Repair (E)
Alison Chaiken and Brian Hickey
Room 110
In 2012 Massachusetts voters resoundingly endorsed the principle of control over their own devices when they passed the Right to Repair ballot measure. "Right to Repair requires automakers to sell the same repair and diagnostic information and tools to independent repair shops, consumers and franchised dealerships." What are the implications of the Right to Repair movement for consumer choices about automotive software and more broadly, for the right of owners to control the software that runs on their personal electronic devices? 2012 brought news about trends like autonomous vehicle operation, usage-based insurance, and broad availability of mass-market vehicles that run Gnu Public Licensed software. As regulators and lawmakers struggle to catch up, campaigns like Right to Repair offer an opportunity for the free software movement to make common cause with philosophical allies in the automotive small-business and "shade-tree mechanic" communities. The outcome of upcoming decisions will affect stakeholders ranging from car manufacturers to transportation planners to emergency responders.
Free Software and 3D Printing (F)
Aeva Palecek
Lecture Hall D
Aeva Palecek discusses the current state of Free Software in the context of libre hardware 3D printing - exciting developments, opportunities for further involvement, and areas of concern. The talk will include a demonstration of hardware from Lulzbot - the first libre hardware company to earn the FSF's "Respects Your Freedom" certification.
Saturday Afternoon First Sessions
1:00 PM
When Free Software Isn't (Practically) Better (D)
Benjamin Mako Hill
Lecture Hall D
Expanding the Tent (E)
Deb Nicholson, Jonathan Nadeau, Beth Lynn Eicher
Lecture Hall A
Free Software Communities and the Cloud (F)
Dave Neary
Room 110
Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service, Software as a Service, the move to mobile and tablets... in the world of the cloud, the user has less and less visibility into what is happening under the covers of his computing environment.
What does it mean to be Free Software if you are not distributing any software? What is the nature of communities for cloud projects like OpenStack? In a cloudy world, can people still hope to control their computing environments? When all our applications are web applications, accessed on a mobile platform like a phone or a tablet, does the concept of Free software make any sense? Will mobile and the cloud kill Free Software?
Saturday Afternoon Second Sessions
2:20 PM
LibreOffice 4.0: the history (D)
Italo Vignoli
Room 110
The Document Foundation and LibreOffice were born on September 28, 2010, after several months of incubation, as a fork of OpenOffice.org. The founders were amongst the leaders of the OOo community, and after 10 years under the Sun umbrella envisioned a future of independence, with a foundation based on democracy and merithocracy. LibreOffice has been based on OOo source code, and has attracted a large community of developers which is today the third largest for an open source desktop application. Today, LibreOffice is the free office suite of choice for most enterprise migrations, and the de facto standard for Linux distributions.
Outreach Program for Women: Lessons in Collaboration: Marina Zhurakhinskaya (E) Lecture Hall D
Title TBD (F)
Chris Webber and Evan Prodromou
Lecture Hall A
Saturday Afternoon Third Sessions
3:40 PM
Demystifying Blender: Quick ways to get into 3D Graphics with free software (D)
Bassam Kurdali
Lecture Hall D
Blender is well known, stunningly feature rich and production tested Free 3D animation program. It has the reputation of being hard to use, so we'll attempt here to ease the learning curve, and introduce some fun – but slightly hidden – easy to use features, that can get you making nice effects quickly while you explore the fundamentals. We'll make some, trees and plants, do some rendering, and cover some of the basics on the way, including where to go on and offline for future reference.
Free software for a healthy democracy (E)
Remy DeCausemaker and Paul Tagliamonte
Lecture Hall A
Speakers from the Sunlight Foundation and the RIT Lab for Technological Literacy will discuss the role Free Software plays in improving access, openness, and transparency of the democratic process, and share stories and favorite projects from their adventures in Civic Hacking.
Licensing & compliance: a collective effort (F)
Joshua Gay, Bradley Kuhn, Donald Robertson III
Room 110
Saturday Afternoon Plenary: Richard Stallman followed by the Free Software Awards Ceremony
5:00 PM
Saturday Social Events
6:00 PM
There will be unofficial social events that accompany the LibrePlanet Conference. See Social Events to view the planned events and feel free to add your own.
Sunday, March 24
Breakfast
8:15 AM
9:00 - 5:00 Alternate track: Upstream University training (day-long training, space is limited, register in advance)
Sunday Hackathon Begins
The hackathon will continue for the duration of the conference, with break during plenaries.
Sunday Morning First Sessions
9:00 AM
IPython: tools for the entire lifecycle of research computing (D)
Fernando Perez
Lecture Hall D
The IPython project (http://ipython.org) provides a rich architecture for interactive computing with. Its architecture is designed in a language-agnostic way to facilitate interactive computing in any language, allowing users to mix Python with R, Octave, Julia, Ruby, Perl, Bash and more.
In this talk, I will show how IPython supports all stages in the lifecycle of a scientific idea: individual exploration, collaborative development, large-scale production using parallel resources, publication and education. In particular, the IPython Notebook provides an environment for "literate computing" with a tight integration of narrative and computation. These Notebooks are stored an open document format that provides an "executable paper": notebooks can be version controlled, exported to HTML or PDF for publication, and used for teaching.
Talk title TBD (E)
Wendy Seltzer
Lecture Hall A
LibreJS (F)
Loic Duros
Room 110
Sunday Morning Second Sessions
10:20 AM
Intro to Free Software (D)
Speakers TBD
Room 110
Seeking impact with Free Culture projects (E)
ginger coons
Lecture Hall A
This talk uses Libre Graphics magazine --an art, design and culture publication produced with Free/Libre software and methods-- as a case study for the discussion of organization, centralization and credibility in Free Culture projects. Covering problems of control, institutional relations and dealing with haters, the presentation will offer an insight into walking the line between collective and company.
Debian and GNU (F)
Stefano Zacchiroli
Lecture Hall D
We have a lot of GNU in Debian (hence our GNU/Linux, GNU/kFreeBSD, and GNU/Hurd names and choices), but how are the two projects otherwise related? In this session we will discuss Debian objectives and peculiarities, and how they related to GNU. We will also cover recent collaboration efforts between the two projects and how we can improve upon them to the betterment of Free Software.
Lunch
11:30 AM
Sunday Afternoon First Sessions=
1:00 PM
The Trisquel project, pushing together to the next level (D)
Ruben Rodriguez
Lecture Hall D
Global communities building free Health IT platforms (E)
Michael Downey and Hamish Fraser
Lecture Hall A
OpenMRS is a free software platform to manage electronic medical records, originally designed in 2004 for use in the developing world but now used in a variety health care and research environments. The collaborative needs of physicians in Kenya, Haiti, South Africa, and the US all pointed toward a default model of openness if only to “get work done” in the face of the urgent need of better healthcare in these countries. The modular architecture that evolved has led to an active ecosystem of developers and system implementers who are creating specific tools for different health care needs. As a result, the OpenMRS platform is assisting clinicians and researchers in a wide variety of contexts. In this talk, you’ll hear how people are using OpenMRS to manage health information in everything from small clinics to national health care systems.
Replicant: addressing Android freedom issues (F)
Denis Carikli
Room 110
Sunday Afternoon Second Sessions
2:20
Talk title TBD (D)
Kira
Room 110
Embracing Secure Boot and Rejecting Restricted Boot: Matthew Garrett (E) Lecture Hall D
Microsoft have successfully imposed Secure Boot on broad sections of the PC market, and Restricted Boot continues to be prevelant on mobile devices. How can we ensure that users remain in control of their hardware in order to ensure they remain in control of their software?
Passwords suck, but centralized proprietary services are not the answer (F)
Francois Marier
Lecture Hall A
Passwords are a big problem online and a lot of websites have turned to centralized services to handle logins for them. It's a disturbing trend from a privacy/surveillance point of view, but from a software freedom point of view, it's also turning these proprietary services into core dependencies.
That's why Mozilla is building Persona, a new federated and cross-browser system which makes identity a standard part of the browser. It's simple, privacy-sensitive and entirely free software.
Sunday Afternoon Third Sessions
3:40 PM
Freedom to Organize Online: The CiviCRM Story (So Far) (D)
Donald Lobo and Tim Otten
Lecture Hall A
Servers: The Libre Frontier (E)
Ward, Nico, Martin
Lecture Hall D
Closing Plenary: Negotiation Theory for Geeks: Leslie Hawthorne
Lecture Hall A 5:00 PM
The best free software hackers are great at the "soft skills" related to hacking - resolving conflict, gathering support around a direction for the project, and understanding what the user *really* wants when filing a bug report. Every feature request and implementation discussion, bug report and mailing list thread is a negotiation.
There is a well established, common sense, very effective way to think of negotiations which will help you improve as a developer, and make your project better at the same time, from the Harvard Negotiation Project. In this talk, Leslie Hawthorn will provide an overview of negotiation theory and pointers to further resources. She will also explore the importance of *both* empathy and transparency in our communications as we look to make our free software project communities most successful.
While Leslie owns many a D10 and D20, there will be no role playing exercises included as part this presentation.
Suggestions for lightning talk topics
Lightning talks are short presentations given by conference attendees on free software topics they're passionate about. If you would like to give a talk, please add a bullet here, along with your name (optional). You're also welcome to suggest topics for others to talk about.
- FRDCSA: free software a.i./social software: multi-agent logics, computational semantics, and sequences of increasingly complete theorem provers in the service of social causes -- Andrew Dougherty
- Free gaming on GNU/Linux: The LibrePlanet Gaming Collective and beyond --Mtraceur 18:51, 23 January 2013 (EST)
- Integrating Etherpad Lite with MediaWiki (the EtherEditor Extension Talk) --Mtraceur 18:51, 23 January 2013 (EST)
- Wikipedia, VisualEditor, and Parsoid: Making the sum of human knowledge editable by humans --Mtraceur 14:06, 6 March 2013 (EST)
- Embedded licensing metadata in digital works -- Jonas Öberg
- Coreboot: What you need to know about it. This talk has to take place before the coreboot install party. Its purpose is to give enough background to the people wanting coreboot to be installed on their computer(why coreboot, how to reflash,how to edit the variables etc...). -- Denis Carikli
Theme, Making Free Software Full Time: If your full time occupation is contributing to the software freedom movement full time, please give a lightening talk about how the revenue that pays your wages is generated.
- Open-source science: Jalview and friends - sequence analysis for all! -- Jim Procter
