You were warned: I wrote on Wednesday that it would be a good idea to get your badges at the Hampton Inn at game night…
Posts published in “Community”
FOSS Week in Review
Larry’s hanging out up near the 49th parallel, in Bellingham, Washington, for the LinuxFest Northwest conference. He’ll be filing reports over the weekend and possibly on Monday, so stay tuned. Meanwhile, I get to do the Week in Review — because the boss likes me best.
OSCON’s packing its bags
Speaking of conferences, OSCON’s making a big move. Although the annual conference presented by publisher O’Reilly Media started in my old stomping grounds of Monterey, California in 1999, the event has been held in Portland, Oregon every year since 2003, except for 2009 when it made a one-off stop in San Jose. This year OSCON will once again be held in Portland, on July 20-24, then that’s it, for at least a year.
Late last week, Rachel Roumeliotis reported in a blog on the OSCON website that after this year’s event, the conference will be packing up and making a move. In 2016, OSCON will unfold it’s tents in Austin, Texas, with the conference being held May 16=20.
Why Austin? Cited for reasons are the city’s many software communities, such as All Girl Hack Night and Google Development Group Austin, as well as Texas based tech firms such as Rackspace, Dell, SoftLayer, Continuum, and OpenStack. It doesn’t look like this move will be permanent, however. According to the post: “As with OSCON in Amsterdam…we want to explore these communities and offer those software engineers and architects the OSCON experience.”
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
Sure there’s a lot going on right now: A report posted on the OSCON site this week has the show — which everyone assumed would be in Portland forever — moving to Austin and being rescheduled to May in 2016. Let’s call that AusCON from here on in.
Then there’s the release of Ubuntu 15.04, complete with the adjective and animal beginning with the same letter — Vivid Vervet this time around.
But what’s more important than those two items at the moment — we can deal with those later — is that LinuxFest Northwest is ramping up its 15th annual show in Bellingham, Washington, this week.
LinuxFest Northwest — just south of the border (the Canadian one, that is) — is like Old Man River: It just keeps rolling along. Shows come and go, they grow and move, but the oldest community-run expo has put down some solid roots at Bellingham Technical College. The show has grown over the years, and so has the college. With recent improvements over the last few years, LFNW has grown to be a top-notch destination for speakers, exhibitors and attendees, with around 80 presentations being part and parcel of LFNW’s weekend fare.
The title? Oh, This Is How It Works? Yeah, because this is how it works. Working together in collaboration. Leaving your ego and your bias at the door. Kicking off your shoes and joining a group already assembled. Opening your mind to new and possibly better things that you bring to the table. This is how it works.
Changing someone’s world.
Changing a lot of someone’s world for that matter. Changing lives for a great and a new day…a great and new day for just them. A change that allows them to do things that physical inability restricted them from doing before now.
Not doing it for the few minutes your name and face will be on some website, or for a mention on the front page of a big city newspaper. Also, not doing it for money.
No, what you are doing is joining others with many of the same values, talents and dreams. People who are working not for their own but for someone else’s future…someone you and they will probably never know or even meet. They are half a world away and not dreaming that in just a few hours someone else is going to fix something broken within them. And they’re doing this fixing simply because they have the ability to do it.
Ken Starks is the founder of the Helios Project and Reglue, which for 20 years provided refurbished older computers running Linux to disadvantaged school kids, as well as providing digital help for senior citizens, in the Austin, Texas area. He was a columnist for FOSS Force from 2013-2016, and remains part of our family. Follow him on Twitter: @Reglue
Last week in Columbia, South Carolina, the developers’ conference POSSCON went through something of a reboot. Last year the conference was cancelled to allow It-oLogy, the organization behind the event, to put its energy behind launching the Great Wide Open conference in Atlanta. This year, with last year’s successful premiere of the Hotlanta event under its belt, IT-oLogy pulled-out all the stops to reestablish POSSCON.
Putting a popular conference on hold for a year could easily have proved to be a big mistake, especially since POSSCON takes place in IT-oLogy’s hometown. Not to fear, however, as the crowds returned, like the swallows to Capistrano, to Columbia’s Vista district where the conference is held.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
With Lots O’ LibrePlanet Pics!
It was like a roundhouse punch to the side of the head from the Good News Fairy — the news that Reglue was chosen for the Free Software Foundation’s (FSF) Award for Projects of Social Benefit to be handed-out in Cambridge at LibrePlanet.
At MIT, the conference venue, I was also surprised by the large attendance, but more than that, by the number of people who traveled across oceans to be there. Beforehand, I received emails from Venezuela, South Africa, all parts of the EU, and one from Georgia. And no, not the Georgia bordering Tennessee.
Ken Starks is the founder of the Helios Project and Reglue, which for 20 years provided refurbished older computers running Linux to disadvantaged school kids, as well as providing digital help for senior citizens, in the Austin, Texas area. He was a columnist for FOSS Force from 2013-2016, and remains part of our family. Follow him on Twitter: @Reglue
On Saturday the 21st of March, I climbed on board a passenger aircraft in order to eventually arrive in Boston that same day. It had one stop, where I had to change flights, but with 44 minutes between boardings, I was fine.
Except the connecting flight was four terminals away and I had to catch the local robo train to get to there. I had no idea where to catch it or when to get off of it. Thankfully, I was still in Texas and I spoke the dialect.
Oh wait…no I didn’t.
I didn’t speak at all. I no longer have a larynx. Try flying one third of the way across the United States without having the ability to speak…
In all, it wasn’t all that traumatic. Not for me anyway. But there were some interesting observations I made while on my trek.
Ken Starks is the founder of the Helios Project and Reglue, which for 20 years provided refurbished older computers running Linux to disadvantaged school kids, as well as providing digital help for senior citizens, in the Austin, Texas area. He was a columnist for FOSS Force from 2013-2016, and remains part of our family. Follow him on Twitter: @Reglue
Columbia, South Carolina’s Posscon conference is still a couple of weeks away and already nearly sold out. We’re hearing from the conference organizers that anyone planning on attending who hasn’t gotten tickets yet should take care of that pronto, before it’s too late.
Posscon, primarily a developers’ conference, has a few talks on the schedule which might fly beneath the radar for the hardcore coders and developers who make up the lion’s share of those in attendance. Here’s five that catch my interest and which would be on my dance ticket if I was able to make the event:
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
It didn’t take nearly as long to count the votes for our desktop poll as it did for last week’s distro poll, mainly due to the fact that not as many of you voted, but also because there aren’t nearly as many desktop environments and window managers as their are Linux distros. Also, unlike the distro poll, there was a clear cut winner instead of a virtual tie.
Actually, of course, it’s not about winners and losers. It’s about what you like. It’s about preferences. After all, unless you’re a diehard command line person, the desktop is how you interact with your computer.
Again this year, KDE tops the list with a commanding lead, piling up over a quarter of the 617 votes cast. This is a huge drop from the 70 percent showing it made the last time we conducted a desktop poll, back in January and February of last year. In that poll, however, users were only given three desktop choices — KDE, GNOME 3 and Cinnamon. This year, voters were served up a menu that included eight popular desktops from which to choose. As in last year’s poll, voters could also opt to place write-in votes.
Why KDE? According to your comments, there were two major reasons: stability and configurability, with many of you saying, “It just works.” But there seemed to be some disagreement over whether KDE’s legendary configurability is as great as it once was.
Ken Starks put another well deserved feather in his cap on Saturday when he accepted an award for Reglue from the Free Software Foundation (FSF) at the LibrePlanet conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Reglue was announced as this year’s winner of the Project of Social Benefit Award by FSF executive director John Sullivan, who also announced that Sébastien Jodogne had won this year’s award for Advancement of Free Software. The event took place on the MIT campus.
For those of you who are new to the FOSS community, Ken Starks founded the nonprofit Reglue, then known as the HeliOS Project, in 2005 to put refurbished computers in the hands of school aged children whose families couldn’t otherwise afford them. In the ten years since its inception, Reglue has placed over 1,100 computers with children living in the Austin, Texas area, and has been both a model and inspiration for other organizations with similar goals across the country.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux