Events
Friday 18:00
Friday 20:00
release party
Release party for Journal of Peer Production #5 Shared Machine Shops and for Book of Peer Production.
free punch served!
Friday 20:30
Kurbeats - Live Concert
Folktronica is the mutant child of Scandinavian Folk music and Electronica.
This album sets out to discover this new path. It blends acoustic instruments and jojk captured in the Kurbeats studio with digitally rendered soundscapes created by An...
Saturday 10:00
What do you mean, "Full Commonism"?
What do we mean when we talk about "commons"? Often, the answer is something like "a pool of resources" - and a particular way of managing those resources. In this session, I'll talk about another way of understanding commons: as an alternative to...
Jekyll - Blogging like a programmer
Blogging tools are normally bloated and power demanding as well as web-administrated. This talk will step by step show how amazing and simple it can be to create and write to a powerful and lightweight blog. We will look at
Open source localized through Translatewiki.net
We will present how the Translationwiki.net project works. Depending on the groups interest we can focus solely on translators or we can also cover the possibilities and challenges for programmers. Afterwards we will have a hands-on workshop where...
First we will shortly present an overview of the Translationwiki.net project, what it is all about and describe how the project works. During the presentation we will mainly focus on the translators’ perspective, but depending on the group’s interest we can also cover the possibilities and challenges for programmers interested in integrating their messages on Translatewiki.net. The presentation will be followed by a hands-on workshop where we will work on translating messages on Translatewiki.net (live of course!).
Saturday 11:00
Open source code for traffic noise prediction in the EU
What is the noise level from road traffic outside your window? It can of course be measured, but more commonly it is calculated using a method based on traffic flow, speed and so on. This used to be a method only implemented in expensive and close...
Many countries around the world use official noise prediction methods for city and infrastructure planning. Often the method itself is publicly available as a paper report, but in practice it is used in a software tool which is expensive and closed source, and as a consequence only available to experts. When the European Commission started to collect statistics about how many inhabitants are exposed to noise from the member states in 2007 they noticed that the national methods in use were very different, and started the Cnossos-EU project. This project has recently developed a common European calculation method, and provides an open source code (EUPL) that implements it. This creates a unique opportunity for both the research and the FOSS community to use the code in new and interesting ways, and it shows the path forward for other official methods in the environment field. In the end it may lead to more transparency when using the noise prediction methods since calculated results can be verified by non-experts using free tools.
Invisible infrastructure and Visible Commons
Sympathy for Data
Sympathy for Data is a visual dataflow programming platform for data analysis
written in Python. The platform was initially developed in a large company and
it has been released as free software/open source. A story about developing the
softwar...
Sympathy for Data is a visual dataflow programming platform for data analysis
written in Python. It was initially developed within an enterprise environment
and is now released as free software/open source.
We will describe how and why the software was sold in to management and company
lawyers to allow us to avoid proprietary lock-in of the software.
There are several competing products in the market aimed at business
intelligence (BI) but we did not find that any of these were suitable for
scientific engineering problems. BI-tools usually work with SQL-databases and
tabular data which is a serious limitation. The technical choices behind the
design of Sympathy for Data are to be motivated.
Sympathy for Data is currently powering a couple of demanding applications for
data processing, modelling and prediction within an enterprise context. We are
going to talk about these applications and show a short demonstration of the
platform in action.
Introduction to the Wikimedia APIs
Have you considered integrating information from Wikipedia in your product or service? In this session we will give an introduction to the APIs of Wikipedia and its sister projects followed by a short workshop. Possible queries are "Give me all of...
Saturday 12:00
Blurry line between private service and public infrastructure
The Net is vast and decentralized; it treats censorship as damage and routes around it... not. We're losing the open Internet to closed, walled gardens due to our own complacency, giving up control over our commun...
We're decentralizing IANA and ICANN, so that no single entity has overwhelming control over the Internet, which is cute when we take into account that most of what everybody does on the Internet these days happens on Facebook.
The power to impound domains starts to look meager compared to the power of the power Facebook has over groups and events. We're using a private service as if it was public infrastructure and act surprised when information on manipulating our feeds comes out.
Decentralised, federated services and platforms are many, but use incompatible protocols, making it hard for users to choose, and fragmenting the community, making it look weak and small.
Is there a way out? Can we do anything about it?
Network neutrality debate showed that there are legitimate places where regulation can come in. Maybe we should explore and define how large communication platforms, regardless of protocols used, can be regulated to ensure interoperability between different platforms?
Collaborations with Wikimedia?
There are plenty of ways of collaborating with Wikimedia. This talk will give a few examples of what has been done earlier and showcase a selection of organisations. It is primarily aimed for you who have had a few thoughts and ideas of ways to co...
Saturday 12:45
Saturday 14:00
Invisible Monopolies and the Language of Freedom
The talk will be about how this community -- the kinds of people who come to FSCONS -- has as an unusual perception into the presence and effects of information monopolies, how important it is to communicate that perception to those who don't have...
Saturday 15:15
What's cooking in GNOME
The talk will introduce to some of the design philosophies inherent in GNOME 3 as well as the main changes brought to users and developers. Also, since GNOME 3.14 is another step of a long lasting incrementally improved user experience, the future...
With the GNOME 3.14 release in October many visible improvements were delivered to users around the world.
While many people already excitedly use GNOME 3 with the new user experience, some feature of the new and elegant desktop like distraction-free notifications or redesigned system settings are not yet wildly known. We also did many things on the plumbing layer such as allowing GNOME to run Wayland.
Public Meal
This talk will be about communal eating in relation to resistance and its potential in building commons. With Gezi Protests of Turkey from June 2013 and its main aspects in the background, my focus will be on a specific practice "yeryuzu sofralar...
Snowden Phone
How can Burmese democracy activists communicate without the government knowing? And how can you help?
In Denmark we have recently had a referendum. They have also had that in Burma, but opposite us the Burmese do not invite their opponents out for drinks after a debate.
A year ago I was in Burma where I met a couple who fought for democracy in Burma. Up to the referendum she was jailed and he was tortured. It was not because you were not allowed to do propaganda, but you were not allowed to argue for a 'No' to the referendum.
I inquired a bit more on why he was tortured. It was not due to the encrypted files on his harddisk, but due to the unencrypted group photo of all the democracy activists: "Who is that? And who is that?" the torturers wanted to know.
Obama says that the surveillance is not bad: "We only log metadata and not the content," he argues. But it is exactly metadata that is dangerous in Burma: Who are you talking to?
Snowden Phone aims to be a communication app for Android smartphones that makes it possible to communicate without leaving metadata and thus making it safe for activists world wide - whether they are democracy activists, labor union workers, or just value their privacy and do not want the government snooping on their communication.
Open source localized through Translatewiki.net
We will present how the Translationwiki.net project works. Depending on the groups interest we can focus solely on translators or we can also cover the possibilities and challenges for programmers. Afterwards we will have a hands-on workshop where...
First we will shortly present an overview of the Translationwiki.net project, what it is all about and describe how the project works. During the presentation we will mainly focus on the translators’ perspective, but depending on the group’s interest we can also cover the possibilities and challenges for programmers interested in integrating their messages on Translatewiki.net. The presentation will be followed by a hands-on workshop where we will work on translating messages on Translatewiki.net (live of course!).
Saturday 16:15
Learning the meaning of words from text
How do we tell a computer what a word means? As software engineers, you would probably come up with an idea such as making an object-oriented model of the domain you're interested in, and then creating a mapping from word strings to the concepts...
Saturday 17:15
TTIP and Free Software
Two years after the rejection of ACTA by the European Parliament, new international agreements deeply worry digital rights defenders on both sides of the Atlantic. TAFTA/TTIP and CETA are deep and comprehensive free trade agreements currently bein...
From the little information we now have on TTIP and CETA, there are many reasons to worry. We identified several threats to the free software ecosystem and to digital freedoms. The agreements threaten positive reforms of copyright and patent law, could strengthen DRM protection, hinder laws giving priority to free software in public procurement, prevent strong regulations on data protection and make the enforcement of rules on net neutrality ineffective.
This talk will primarily be focused on 1) TTIP and free software, with an opening towards 2) the impact on digital rights in general, and if there is time left we will 3) debate the impact of TTIP and other agreements on all other sectors of interest.
Vala? What's that?
Vala is a programming language that aims to bring modern programming language features to GNOME developers without imposing any additional runtime requirements and without using a different ABI compared to applications and libraries written in C.
...
Saturday 18:00
Saturday 18:15
Saturday 19:00
Platform and Language independent framework for speech recognition
Create an easily extensible framework for utilizing speech input in any language to query a dataset of content and provide result set. The demo system takes a speech query in Telugu (a South Indian language) and converts it into text. The resultan...
In this presentation we would like to show how the above is implemented by below:
- Preparation of global phone set which typically replaces latin letters with a unique combination of english letters from the below link:
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/stone-catend/trimain1.htm
- Transliteration of the available data in unicode with the use of global phone set
- Write and test parsing to chunk the transcription into individual phonemes
- Use of ehmm in festvox or HTKAlign to do automatic labelling of speech into phonemes
- Use of speech tools such as festvox or HTS to train the voice
- Use of festival to generate the synthetic speech
- Write and test JavaScript for Text-To-Speech synthesis system
- Write codes to do automatic labelling of speech data which is to be used for speech recognition
- Prepare a dictionary with each word in the vocabulary against its corresponding phoneme representation
- Use of speech tools such as SphinxTrain or HTK to train the acoustic models for speech recognition
- Use of speech tools such as CMUCLMTK or HLMTools to prepare language model
- Build and test the system with sphinxdecode or HDecode
- Collect ...
Mandos - Disk encryption without passwords
Disk encryption is essential for physical computer security, but seldom used due to the trouble of remembering and typing a password at every restart. We describe Mandos, a program which solves this problem, its security model, and the underlying...
Any security system must have a clear view of its intended threat model – i.e. what threats it is actually intended to protect against; the specific choices and tradeoffs made for Mandos will be explained. Another danger of security system design is the risk of its non-use; i.e. that the system will not be used for some real or perceived drawbacks, such as complexity. The deliberate design choices of Mandos, involving low-interaction, “invisible” and automatic features, will be covered.
Automotive Grade Android
The Automotive Grade Android is an open source software platform that enables you to integrate your Android application with an In-Vehicle Infotainment system. It uses standard, well-known tools to allow developers to integrate applications with t...
Our free software community is at http://developer.lindholmen.se
Advanced GNU Parallel
GNU parallel is a shell tool for executing jobs in parallel using one or more computers. A job can be a single command or a small script that has to be run for each of the lines in the input. The typical input is a list of files, a list of hosts, ...
GNU parallel makes sure output from the commands is the same output as you would get had you run the commands sequentially. This makes it possible to use output from GNU parallel as input for other programs.
For each line of input GNU parallel will execute command with the line as arguments. If no command is given, the line of input is executed. Several lines will be run in parallel. GNU parallel can often be used as a substitute for xargs or cat | bash.
A lot of new options have been introduced since was presented at FSCONS2010. These options will be shown.
If you use the command line several times a week, then your command line will love you for learning GNU Parallel.
Saturday 21:00
Skillnicker - Live Concert
With five years of touring together Patrik and Niklas have developed a style of high speed, creative and playful mixing where Bach meets Britney, Skrillex – Sinatra or Major Lazer – Madonna. In a one hour set the duo usually clocks in over a hundr...
Sunday 10:00
Cinema: The Lucas Plan
The Lucas Plan was an initiative by workers in an arms manufacturing industry in 1976 to take over the factory and turn it into making socially useful goods instead of weapons. After the film we will discuss the implications and historical lessons.
Webmaking, Connected Learning & Libraries
Starting from Web making to Maker Parties through Connected Learning and Hives, we take down a stroll to what a digitally connected education and knowledge map looks in the present day world. We put the thinking glasses on as to how we can form a ...
Sunday 11:00
Current issues and projects in the Maker movement
Current issues and projects in the Maker movement.
What is the maker movement, and why is it so important for the future of education, culture, and economy? We give a brief overview of the maker movement, and share our experiences from organizing Maker Faire in Oslo in 2013 and 2014, and more recently MakerCon – a conference by and for makers. These events have been successful in creating a network of makers and makerspaces in Oslo, but also in the other Nordic countries.
The case for crowdfunding Free Software
Good software is expensive to make, and Free Software is no exception. The need for Free Software in the post-Snowden world is greater than ever, and developers are ready to make it. So how can we solve the funding and promotion crisis that is hol...
Good software is expensive to make, and Free Software is no exception. Six years ago, the Blender Foundation crowdfunded "Big Buck Bunny". What's happened since then? Countless Free Software projects have frustrated their users with missed targets, exaggerated expectations, and absent source code. While proprietary games, plugins, and even fonts race ahead with tens of millions of dollars in collected donations, Free Software lags behind with a handful of major successes.
Yet the primary benefits of crowdfunding provide precisely what most Free apps need: dollars, exposure and focus. Well planned campaigns deliver fast, scalable, and sustainable results. Best of all they connect developers directly to their users, completing the development cycle without the need for corporate direction. So why does the potential of this radical method remain largely untapped?
In this talk I'll explain how crowdfunding is the perfect fit for many Free Software projects, how the Heartbleed bug highlighted a wider resourcing crisis, and explore new models of crowdfunding that could reliably fund our software in future.
The Luddite Aspects of Hackerdom
The Luddite Aspects of Hackerdom is about hackers against technology. Some hackers resist technological change when the latest developments are harmful to users and society. Similarly, in the early days of industrial capitalism when factory techno...
A federated social web?
GNU social is a working, though aging, implementation of a federated social web protocol in use by thousands of federated users on different nodes. But there are other networks with even more users - but the protocols we speak keep us apart. How w...
While we have several mature communication technologies working globally in a federated fashion, such as the e-mail protocol suite and XMPP, much development focus lately has been on implementing similar functionality for the web using HTTP. Nowadays, very few develop public ”communities” (forums, chatrooms) anymore, instead these tend to be called ”social networks” and are centralised structures run by private companies with little to no transparency.
Meanwhile, desktop clients and platform-agnostic instant messaging is being replaced with service-locked ”apps” for handheld computers. So far none of the giants in these fields have had even a drop of FLOSS reasoning – and none allow for sysadmins to run their own instances of the server software.
Unfortunately, on the free software side of things, just about every ”social” implementation has invented its own protocol for interaction and federation – ensuring incompatibility with others. So are we really any better?
What we must ask ourselves is if there is a chance all free, federating social networks could somehow converge and end up using the same protocol – or do we need a polyglot approach where every network has a ”bridg...
Sunday 12:00
Cockpit - server management done easy
server management done easy
Running your own Linux server, while useful, is honestly quite hard. Often in order to get things working on your own server you'll have to blindly paste commands from the internet to the black prompt and hope for the best.
This talk is an introduction to the Cockpit project. It is a user interface, the face of the server, running in a web browser. It is perfect for new sysadmins, allowing them to easily perform simple tasks such as storage administration, inspecting journals and starting and stopping services.
Read more at: http://cockpit-project.org/
The Swedish Mozilla community one year later
At FSCONS 2013 Mozilla community members Soumya Chakraborty and Oliver Propst set out create a Swedish Mozilla community. In
this presentation they share the progress that have been made, lessons learned and the road ahead.
Mozilla, the project behind popular free/open source software such as the Firefox Webbrowser are famous for its many communities across the world but in Sweden Mozilla have traditionally not have a local community.
At FSCONS 2013 Mozilla community members Soumya Chakraborty and Oliver Propst set out create a Swedish Mozilla community. In this presentation they share the progress that have been made, lessons learned and the road ahead.
Cooperation and the Commons
Presentation of a new kind of Commons Reciprocity License to facilitate an ‘open cooperativism’ movement.
Social movements today are faced with a paradox. On the one hand, we have the emergence of commons based peer production in fields such as free software, open design and open hardware, which while creating knowledge commons available to the whole of humanity, are dominated by and dependent on, large multinational enterprises and start-up culture for their social reproduction. On the other hand we have a resurgence of interest in economic democracy as exercised through worker owned and cooperative enterprises but while internally democratic, the social and community benefit as enshrined in the 7 cooperative principles is often limited or undermined by business models based on intellectual property and market competition. What is needed is a synthesis, an ‘open cooperativism’ that combines the
best of both commons based peer production and the democratic governance and ownership charachteristic of coops and the social solidarity economy. However such an approach presents challenges of it's own. One solution being a new kind of Commons Reciprocity License. These challenges and the license are the focus of a presentation by Kevin Flanagan of the P2P Foundation.
Sunday 12:45
Sunday 14:00
Models We Use to Change the World
Drawing on sources as diverse as computer security, gender studies, social science, and economics, this talk will answer questions such as: what can threat modeling teach you about community building and succession planning? When do you fork a sof...
Sunday 15:15
Maker Ninja Workshop
Learn how to become a maker ninja!
Maker ninja Jasmine Idun Lyman with a team from Collaboratory: Carl Gustafsson, Henrik Hörlin, Mustafa Wasin and Ásgeir Sigurjónsson, will guide the participants through a maker challenge. Together we will build crazy machines to make our game characters travel through space. No specific skills are required but if you have programming skills bring your laptop, and if you are under 18 bring a parent, there will be plenty of tools to build with, everything from arduinos to yarn. If you need inspiration check Rube Goldberg machines. We are looking forward to build and play with you!
FLOSS in Estonia
Migrating five educational organizations of Tallinn to Ubuntu and associated challenges; Terminal-server project based on Chinese ARM boards; DevOps curriculum '15 at Estonian IT College
What is Estonian e-residence and what you can do with it: I...
Building a Society of the Commons in Ecuador
A discussion of the FLOK Society Project (Free, Libre, Open Knowledge Society): http://www.floksociety.org
The aim of FLOK is to develop a set of public policy proposals for the transformation of Ecuador into a society and an economy that is base...
Breaking digital firewalls in the Arab Spring
The talk presents some of the conclusions of a PhD study conducted during 2010-2012 on website censorship and circumvention in the Arab world during the Arab spring. It also exemplifies a case where activism work through the construction and deplo...
Sunday 16:15
Innovative collaboration
The presentation will cover experiences from practice and ongoing research focused on exploring new forms of collaborations and relationships between actors involved in development of Open Standards and associated Open Source implementations.
The European Commission published an official communication (COM(2013) 455 final) on 25 June 2013, which recognises the importance of Open Standards for addressing lock-in. However, a number of studies show that Swedish and European organisations do not utilise the full potential of Open Source and Open Standards.
For a number of years, organisations have adopted a number of different standards and software solutions. In many cases, such adoption has resulted in a number of challenges related to: lack of interoperability, technological lock-in, and long-term maintenance of digital assets and software. These challenges need to be effectively addressed by organisations seeking to utilise Open Standards when developing innovative long-term sustainable Open Source solutions.
The presentation will cover experiences from practice and ongoing research focused on exploring new forms of collaborations and relationships between actors involved in development of Open Standards and associated Open Source implementations. By drawing from a number of studies, illustrative examples will elaborate challenges and specifically comment on how these can be addressed. In conclusion, new and m...
Novelty against sovereignty
By way of a comparison between two subcultures/communities that both assert their autonomy vis-à-vis the State through a 'flight into the future', hackers and psychonauts, the former innovating around intellectual property law, the latter around c...
Deploy your own ecosystem for electronic communication
Between giants Email Service Providers and people running their own email server at home stands Fripost, a democratic email association where executives are elected by the members, and which is aim...
The internet, and electronic mail in particular, started out as
decentralized protocols. However, since the 90's the trend has been for
giant corporations to centralize said protocols, or worse create new
proprietary ones not even compatible with that of their competitors.
If these large internet actors are interested in providing such services
at a large scale, often free of charge, it is clearly not by
philanthropy, but because that makes their users — or "products"
as Bruce Schneier puts it — a better value for their
customers, the advertisers.
Furthermore, centralisation often means central point of failure, and
the revelations of secrete programs such as PRISM show how valuable
large internet actors are for intelligence agencies, and the extend of
the ties between them, whether they are built voluntarily, through
National Security Letters, or via a rogue employee.
On the other extreme one could always run their own SMTP and IMAP
servers at home; however that usually comes with a l...
Sunday 17:15
panel debate on peer production
A panel discussion against the background of the experiences in Ecuador with the FLOK project, How to strike the balance between selling-out and implementing one's goal. Can a state be a peer?
speakers to be announced during the day
Security aspects for email service providers
Practical security aspects of running an email service provider from an entrepreneur who has been running a commerical email service for 13 years. From a business and leadership perspective.
Started email service Runbox in 1999. Has deployed over...
Security from an organizational, insititutional and legal perspective.
Handling subphonas from Scandinavia, Norway.
Handling subphoenas from USA.
Handling subphoneas from FBI.
Legal threats.
Legal requirements.
Insider threats.
Consulting threats.
Corporate alterts and warning systems.
Technical threats from a leadership perspective.
Thoughts on safety for the future:
Make it more expensive to track and monitor.
Multiple accounts.
Fake addresses.
Fake street address.
Split up the infrastructure.
Multiple juristictions.
Account management.
Lock down passwords.
Legal preparation.
Plausible denial.
Passing through customs.
Sunday 18:00
Sunday 18:15
Sunday 19:00
Fraktalfabriken workshop
Welcome to explore and create using some of our inventions like the nameless amazing connectable triangles, our modification of the super awesome strawbee in to a really simple pipe connector to build spaghetti towers on steroids. Maybe we will th...
Building local communities and making then rock
In this talk, I would like to showcase the work of Loco council of
ubuntu in handing of local communities and sustaining them. More on the Ubuntu loco council here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LoCoCouncil
In this talk I would like to show how the ubuntu loco council handles teams by:
To provide independent guidance for the LoCo Community.
To maintain quality of governance in the LoCo community.
To assess and re-assess teams for verified state.
To provide input and feedback to other Ubuntu governance boards
regarding the needs and achievements of the LoCo community.
To act as an independent, objective, third party to resolve conflict
in teams by acting as mediator for a group or individuals
How we allocate resources
How we help people to create teams and sustain them and so on.
Promoting Free Software Through Video
Visual communication is a strong way to send a message when shared and spread across the internet. I'll talk primarily about my experience from creating promotional videos for GNOME and take you behind the scenes on how the videos are created.
My name is Bastian and I've been part of GNOMEs engagement team for approximately a year or two. I want to promote the usage of a free desktop and this led me to start creating promotional videos. When GNOME 3.12 was released, a release video was released on social media which since then has gained more than 50,000 views and 400 comments. That's why I believe creating promotional videos and communicating through video is an important way to engage with your users and spread the word about a free software project. They are entertaining and creates immersion.
In this talk I'll show bits from the videos I have produced for GNOME and give a tour of the different stages there is to creating a typical I will also elaborate on some techniques which can be used to spice up the videos and give an insight in the (free) software I use to design and create them in.