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Conservancy Blog
Displaying posts tagged events
RHEL Panel Discussion at FOSSY 2023
by on July 19, 2023
This past weekend, July 13-16th, 2023, Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) hosted and ran a new conference, FOSSY (Free and Open Source Software Yearly) in Portland, Oregon, USA. I was glad to host the keynote panel discussion on the recent change made by Red Hat (now a subsidiary of IBM) regarding the public source code releases for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).
The panelists included (in alphabetical order) Jeremy Alison, software engineer at CIQ (focused on Rocky Linux) and Samba co-founder, myself, Bradley M. Kuhn, policy fellow at SFC, benny Vasquez, the Chair of the AlmaLinux OS Foundation, and James (Jim) Wright, who is Oracle’s Chief Architect for Open Source Policy, Strategy, Compliance, and Alliances.
Red Hat themselves did not reply to our repeated requests to join us on this panel, but we were able to gather the key organizations impacted by Red Hat's recent decision to cease public distribution of RHEL sources. SUSE was also invited but let us know they were unable to send someone on short notice to Portland for the panel.
We're very glad to make the video available to everyone who has been following this evolving story. FOSSY is a new event, and we've hopefully shown how running a community-led FOSS event here in Portland each summer creates an environment where these kinds of important discussions can be held to explore issues impacting FOSS users around the world.
I thank our panelists again for booking last-minute travel to be with us for this exciting panel and thank all the FOSSY attendees for their excellent questions during the panel.
I hope to see all of you at next years' FOSSY!
Conservancy Staff at Virtual GUADEC
by on July 17, 2020
This year's GUADEC — the GNOME community's annual conference — will be virtual. Two Conservancy staffers are participating and the conference will be run using the free (as in freedom) Big Blue Button platform. We're especially looking forward to being part of an event that doesn't encourage attendees to engage with proprietary software.
Our Executive Director, Karen Sandler is co-presenting with Molly de Blanc on "Introducing Principles of Digital Autonomy", they'll be sharing an activist's perspective on how we interact with technology on a daily basis and how the technology using public could re-imagine that relationship in a way that better respects user autonomy and privacy. The talk will stream on July 22nd, at 18:45 UTC.
Our Director of Community Operations, Deb Nicholson will present two topics at GUADEC this year. On July 23rd, at 17:15 UTC, she will share her communication strategies in "Let's Have Great Meetings!" Then on Saturday, she will present "Building Ethical Software Under Capitalism" on July 25th at 18:45, a look at alternative tactics for creating software that doesn't exploit its users.
This year's event is free (as in cost) to attend and conveniently located online. Registration is open now -- see you next week!
Videos From The Past and Upcoming Virtual Appearances
by on April 27, 2020
We've got a handful of videos from free software events that took place earlier this year and then two upcoming online appearances with different communities.
Videos From Before Shelter-in-place
Bradley and Karen both attended linux.conf.au, a fantastic, long-running community conference that was held at Australia's Gold Coast in January. Bradley Kuhn, our Policy Fellow and Hacker-in-Residence gave a tutorial on the GNU General Public License, version 2 aimed at helping folks participate knowledgeably in both internal and external licensing conversations, "Introduction to Linux's License." Karen Sandler, our Executive Director co-presented with Bradley on the challenges of being a FOSS Activist, "Open Source Won, but Software Freedom Hasn't Yet: A Guide & Commiseration Session for FOSS Activists."
On the day before FOSDEM, Deb Nicholson, our Director of Community Outreach keynoted CHAOSSCon in Brussels. Her presentation, "Ethics: What You Know & What You Don't Know" is about biases, pre-conceptions and how to work though them when you're building and optimizing free software communities.
SCaLE (aka the Southern California Linux Expo), a large FOSS community conference, was held in early March. Vagrant Cascadian is one of the lead developers working on Reproducible Builds and he gave a talk titled, "There and Back Again, Reproducibly!" Reproducible Builds is a Conservancy member project that works on a process to create an independently verifiable path from source code to the binary code. Want to learn how it works and why you might want it for your free software project? Then you should definitely check out this talk.
Upcoming Remote Appearances
GNOME is hosting a social hour on the first Friday of every month at 16:00 UTC. The special guest on May 8th will be Deb Nicholson, our Director of Community Outreach. She'll be talking about "Roadmapping and Finding People" which is a talk about planning and delegating for community-driven free software projects.
Deb is also giving a remote talk at Open Source 101 on May 12th, titled Software Licensing and Compliance: It’s All About Community." Tune in at 4:00 PM EDT (20:00 UTC) to catch it live.
Conservancy Supports Successful Ninth Annual DrupalCamp NJ
by on March 19, 2020
Conservancy is proud to have been able to facilitate DrupalCamp NJ for the second year. In this time when so many events are being cancelled, we have a new appreciation for how crucial the in-person events we've already had are for building the free software community. We're glad we were able to support this event.
"Using Machine Learning to Help with Daily Workflows" Photo by Peter Wolanin, available under the CC.BY.SA 2.0 License
The 9th annual DrupalCamp NJ was held on the campus of Princeton University. Over 300 attendees came over 3 days to discuss and learn about web development and Drupal, a free and open source CMS (GPL v2+). This year had a 17.5% rebound in the main campday attendance due in part to moving the main day to Friday from Saturday. They also expanded the trainings on Thursday to offer more topics and boost attendance. About 27% of the attendees were new to Drupal, which is higher than the past few years. Drupal has seen overall growth recently as version 8 has matured and been adopted especially for academic and enterprise websites and web applications.
For 2020 the DrupalCamp NJ organizers made a concerted effort to increase speaker diversity and also reduce the environmental impact of the event. Before the camp, they committed to having 25% of the sessions have a speaker who identified as underrepresented or a first-time speaker. To make this happen they went beyond past outreach efforts and hired a consultant to reach out to new speakers, as well as advertising the speaking opportunity in newsletters geared towards a diversity-minded audiences. In the end, they exceeded their goals! See more at https://www.drupalcampnj.org/announcements/session-submissions-and-speaker-diversity. Of the 25 accepted sessions, 10 had one or more speakers who self-identified as a woman (40% of total), and 15 had one or more speakers who self-identified with an under-represented group in tech (60% of total). The also camp purchased carbon offsets and planted one tree per attendee, and reduced the number of give-aways likely to be thrown away.
"After party at the chemistry building" Photo by Peter Wolanin, available under the CC.BY.SA 2.0 License
Presentations at the event on Drupal continued to focus on version 8 and the upcoming version 9. The community is still getting comfortable with the technical shifts in version 8 such as a major rewrite to use object oriented programming, dependency management with Composer, integration and dependence on Symfony components, and use of Twig for templating. Other presentation topics included progressive decoupling, voice-based search, machine learning, accessibility, testing, team management, and more. All 25 sessions recordings are available on the DrupalCamp NJ website.
Be sure to save the date for the 2021 DrupalCamp NJ and 10th year for the event! It will be January 21-23 at Princeton University. Follow @drupalcampnj on Mastodon or Twitter for the latest updates!
