Schedule FSCONS 2013

Registration

Social Event

Social Event

Social Event Continued

Introductory meeting for family and children visitors

This is an introduction to the conference for families and children. It is also a chance for these visitors to get to know each other for collaboration during the conference.

NoFlo

Designing a new way to build software & manage complexity - a visual development environment for all
....more information coming later

Sustainable banking according to JAK

A description of how it is to co-own, use and manage a bank that hopefully is a pathway towards a new better economic system.

JAK is an interest free (according to definition of interest as "fee not justified be actual work effort"), members owned bank and movement who works for and with fair economy. We have operated an interest free savings and loan system since 1970 and we obtained bank license in 1997. We have over 38 000 members, who all have one vote each in the democratic process.

We base our organization on values that we, the members, have established and we believe that all people can and should talk about economy, since economy concerns our everyday life and the future of this planet. The rules of the economy should be formulated by the people. The design of the economy also determines how other things in our society are to be designed. This means that it is the economy and the money that directly dictate what kind of lives we will lead. Do we prefer to be stressed, work long hours and suffer a lack of energy for friends and family? Or would we rather have time for each other? Would you like to live in a spirit of community and solidarity with others, or continuously feel insecure and uneasy? Economy concerns all of us. It is nothing that we should leave in the hands of so called experts/...

Keep Calm and Code New Laws

On the surface of reality, everything looks just fine. It looks like never in our history have we been so creative, so inspiring and so productive in every possible way.

On the surface of reality, everything looks just fine. It looks like never in our history have we been so creative, so inspiring and so productive in every possible way. Click randomly on any TED talk or any other of the two zillion inspiring conferences happening in every second on this planet and you will see that we are almost there, that there are just few steps or clicks away to eliminate poverty, cure every disease, make governments accountable and transparent with promising web platforms that will save the world.

But, somehow if we look away from the keyboard (our beloved Internet machines), it doesn't look like something has really changed

We‘ve managed to centralize/monopolize the Internet into the hands of a few huge companies, who in turn hold all information, resources, knowledge and data. We‘ve managed to build an illusion that millions of startups are not just outsourced research and development for those few companies. We somehow believe in the fact that its completely normal that majority of startups or micro business will die in the first two years and those few happy ones will be bought over by the big companies and achieve their ultimate dream to be you...

Libre Graphics Production

In this workshop we will use free software to create a fanzine for print.

It is entirely possible to use free software for professional graphic production.

Print is something where free software is possible to use, but proprietary vendors have a hard lock-in on graphical designers. In this workshop we will use competent tools for creating a Fanzine for print. Tools we will use include: GIMP, Inkscape, Scribus. .

Join in on this hands-on workshop to experience a free graphic production pipeline!

Participants: 20 - SEND AN E-MAIL TO staffan.melin@oscillator.se TO REGISTER!
Equipment: Bring your own laptop

ownCloud

With the potentially cloud-freezing impact of the recent NSA revelations (especially for businesses in Europe) how can users still take advantage of cloud technologies and yet still maintain reasonable security and privacy of their data? Projects ...

Markets beyond Bitcoin

One of the big and still unrealized potentials of Bitcoin is the possibility to build economics into protocols. By making use of this we can create economic incentives where none existed before, and enable as-of-yet non-existent markets in places ...

One of the big and still unrealized potentials of Bitcoin is the possibility to build economics into protocols. By building protocols that makes use of this we can create economic incentives where none existed before. Undesirable digital behaviours can be disincentivized, and thanks to the nature of Bitcoin and its decentralisation we can lower transaction costs (not just fees) to a point where currently non-existent markets are feasible. The reason is that software using software-defined money with no regulation can automate most aspects of transaction costs like search, identification of the product, terms negotiation, settlement, and dispute resolution. Which are those markets, how do we identify them, and is that a future we want?

The speaker thinks this opportunity can be seized to create new technology that aids us in the fight against surveillance laws, improves the way we distribute data, and has the potential to reshape industries. Bittorrent could be vastly improved from barter to a money-based economy where goodwill from the swarm is retained. Tor that relies on donations could be improved or replaced by anonymous internet on tap, displacing a lot of the VPN indust...

The 4th Pillar

My interpretation of cypherpunk utopia rests on four pillars:

1: Secure messaging. We have that since the early 90s with PGP, etc. Mature.

2: Anonymous messaging. We have that since the last 90s now with Tor. Mature but not widely deployed.
...

The MySQL and MariaDB story

The story of how MySQL was created, why it was successful and how it grow until it was sold to Sun, who was then overtaken by Oracle.

It will also cover how and why MariaDB was created and what we are doing to ensure that there will always be a...

Threats of the monetary system and economic growth dependency

Sustainable economy is wishful thinking since our exponentially growing debt requires exponential economic growth. Such an economy is in the end impossible and untenable.

One Person's Utopia Is Another's Dystopia

Human beings are in some respects, and increasingly, becoming functional nodes in complex machine networks. Most of the machine interactions never reach the awareness of anyone. This means that the bases for decision making in technologically deve...

Electronics and microcontroller workshop for kids of all ages

Very early on we all wonder how things work. We want to break things open and tinker. We want to make simple modifications to existing things to understand them and later on extend them. We want to build things that we at first don't understand bu...

This basic electronics and microcontroller workshop is for kids of all ages (that means even big children, a.k.a. adults). We will use Arduino and simple electric components to build circuits from scratch.

A few Arduinos will be available, but please bring your own if you have one.
LJO will sponsor all children with Arduinos.

Participants: 20 - SEND AN E-MAIL TO avtobiff@gmail.com TO REGISTER!

(There is some room for over registration, but late registrations might be left without guidance and help.)

This session seamlessly turns into "Build your own Synthesizer".

Keynote: Proactivism

Build your own Synthesizer

Build your own synthesizer using Raspberry Pi, Arduino, and Pd. Bring your own Raspberry Pi, there will be some Arduino hardware available.

Using the visual programming language Pure Data (aka Pd) we will build so called patches that will be the building blocks of our synthesizer.

Together with Pd, our program will then be loaded onto the Raspberry Pi. To control the synthesizer program we will use an Arduino.

This workshop was prepared together with Nya Perspektiv and electronic musicians for the Norberg festival this summer.

Participants: 20 - SEND AN E-MAIL TO avtobiff@gmail.com TO REGISTER!

(There is some room for over registration, but late registrations might be left without guidance and help.)

This session is in seamless conjunction with "Electronics and microcontroller workshop for kids of all ages".

Libre Jam

In this workshop we will learn to make music using free tools.

In this workshop we will learn to make music using free tools. Using KXStudio, a linux distribution especially targeted for music production, the participants will be introduced to a complete toolset for song production. Those who want to can also prepare for and participate in a evening jam, where the audience will also be able to listen to the results of the workshop.

Participants: 20 - SEND AN E-MAIL TO staffan.melin@oscillator.se TO REGISTER!
Equipment: Bring your own laptop and headphones.
Language: Swedish

Gabriel Nordeborn is a 24-year old guy with a passion for both technology and music. He has been producing his own music for just about 3 years, and as open source software matters to him, he has been doing it on Linux using as much open source software as possible. He has finished and put two solo albums of instrumental music online (https://soundcloud.com/zthmusic/sets/ordinary-day-montage).

Follow the work in making this workshop real on Gabriel's blog: http://www.zthmusic.com/libre-jam-workshop-for-kids/

Kolab

The Kolab Groupware Solution has initially been developed for the needs of the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI). Over a decade and many, many person years of development later Kolab has been released in version 3.0 and version ...

Democracy in organisations, regions and nations

The future of democracy, open participation, referendums and delegative democracy. Examples from around the world.

have followed the development of digital delegative democracy since 1994. Joined Aktiv Democracy in 2009. Interested in alternative movements, knowledge representation and collaboration tools.

Making Ourselves Scarce

The vision of a 'post-scarcity' society lies ahead of us, on the horizon of the techno-political imagination. In a century that looks set to be shaped by the collision with environmental limits to growth, it looks like a wildly utopian scenario.
...

Dovecot

Dovecot is a highly configurable open source email server, which expands into new areas all the time. This unfortunately makes Dovecot somewhat difficult to install if you don't already know everything about email servers. This talk first gives po...

Ethical banks from an international perspective

The world is more and more willing to accept the failure of today’s financial economy, but what alternatives exists? How is ethical banking interpreted in other parts of the world? This will be answered and discussed during our presentation.

Subverting Subversion

The ultimate horror is not the end of civilization, but its endless decline. But how can we get the message out if nobody wants to listen? We at monochrom call our working method »Context Hacking,« thus referencing the hacker culture, which prop...

Ten years with education and freedom

Jan and Peter has worked as teachers for decades. Meeting Per more then a decade ago they together started the journey for renewing courses and educational material, with a focus on free software.

This lecture and seminar will touch on experiences gathered during the last decade, working hard on mantaining educational quality and trying to improve it when possible.

How do you form new courses, and what tools are important to give students?

What advantages and disadvantages does free software give in an educational environment?

Mailpile

Mailpile is a Free Software project to build a modern e-mail client and which improves user privacy and challenges the dominance of the proprietary web-mail solutions. The project places a large emphasis on usability and attempting to make OpenPGP...

A sustainable economy – next steps for action!

The future of a sustainable economy is now! The democracy collective Watch it! facilitates a session wrapping up the ideas and plans spurring with each participant. What happens next? Which are the paths forward and the actions ahead?

Piracy is Liberation

Lightning Talks - Session 1

Section 1: 3*10 minutes
Section 2: 6*5 minutes

Keysigning party

The purpose of this event is to strengthen the OpenPGP and CAcert.org Webs of Trust by certifying each other's identity.

OpenPGP Key-signing: Since we don't expect a lot of people to join this session (but of course everyone is welcome!), we will keep it informal. As usual, the final decision about each certification is left to each signer's appreciation, but it's common to ask the signee for one (or more) government-issued ID(s). People willing to join the party are also encouraged to bring printouts of their key' fingerprint, for instance formatted using the gpg-key2ps tool which can be found in Debian's signing-party package.

CAcert assurance: CAcert members are bound by the Community Agreement. As such, assurers are required to carefully verify applicants' identity against at least one government-issued ID. CAcert "privileges" can be found here.

Movie night

Come and watch free movies and eat popcorn!

We will show movies and animations from the Blender Project.

Headlines:
* Tears of Steel
* Sintel
* Big Buck Bunny
* Elephants Dream

Serengeti meetup

Hang out with Serengeti! If you put free software in an ideological context, possibly leveraging it to improve society, Serengeti is a place for you. This meetup is for all people interested in Serengeti visions and actions, no matter the amount o...

Serengeti is network for those who sympathize with the solidarity movement and want to learn more about, and discuss, free software. Our goal is that more people will discover free software and put it in an ideological context. We hope that more people will understand the value of using free software and operating systems and that it will become more common among organizations and activists within the solidarity movement.

Serengeti promotes free software usage within the solidarity movement, and also promotes a free and equal culture within the free software community. Actions taken towards these goals have been organizing talks and workshops, writing articles and essays, organizing seminars etc.

Our main communication channels is our mailing list and our wiki. It is a digitally based and distributed collaboration.

No matter how much earlier involvement in Serengeti you have, come and hang out if you are the least interested in these questions.

Libre Jam

Evening concert and jam, where the audience will also be able to listen to the results of the workshop.

After a short introduction, the results of the Libre Jam workshop will be presented, followed by a jam session with the workshop participants.

Social Event Continued

Administering the revolution

I'll touch breifly on the topics of funding the revoltuion: the politics of money funding and its recent developments (Arab spring) and ways to find money to administer the revolution today. And then I want to talk about the consequences of admini...

PirateBox

Short description about what PirateBox is and what the targets are.

I'm going to talk about:

• Where are the origins of "PirateBox"


• What a PirateBox is.


• Forks and use cases


• Which kind of hardware is used.


• What's next?


• Life demo of PirateBox.

The Logics for Terms of Services and their Usefulness for Automation

This talk will outline my approach to automatically reading Terms of Services contracts by a computer and checking user-defined properties on the read ToS.

The seed for this project was the talk of Hugo Roy (tosdr.org) from FSCONS 2012 which gave me the idea for a really useful application of the research that I have been doing on Logics for Legal Contracts; the application is to help common Internet service users to deal with (read/understand/verify) the multitude of ToS that they encounter throughout their Internet experience.

This project has three main aspects:
(1) is the more established techniques for how to read ToS texts/language (in possibly multiple language variants) and to build a logical structure that a computer could manipulate;
(2) involves, still to be improved, logics for legal contracts that are meant to be the basis for a computer to really understanding the meaning of the text that it read, the various notions that the text contains, and the many implications and connections;
(3) is the implementation of a system to help users with their daily readings of ToS, necessarily involving human experts, and with a slow convergence to a mostly automated reading and verification process.

For the first part there are good technologies like the Controlled Natural Language Attempto from Zurich and support for m...

Learn how to program with Hackerklubben

Learn how to program with Hackerklubben and Scratch.

In this workshop 8-12 year olds in a playful manner will learn how to program in Scratch. Hackerklubben show how to create projects based on the dreams and wishes of the participants. This could be games or other applications.

Hackerklubben exists to make both people and society as a whole richer by teaching children how to program. Learning how to program stretches your abilities to think, helps you understand and look for systems, and creates patterns of thoughts that you can benefit from in more areas than programming.

Participants: 20 - SEND AN E-MAIL TO staffan.melin@oscillator.se TO REGISTER!
Equipment: Bring your own laptop (we have a limited supply of laptops to use).
Age: 8-12

Organized by Göteborg Hackerspace and Interactive Institute Swedish ICT.

Swedish:

Programmering i Scratch

Lär dig programmera med Hackerklubben

Hackerklubben erbjuder en kurs i programmering i programspråket Scratch där 8-12 åringar bjuds att på ett lekfullt och experimenterande sätt utforksa programmering. Under ett par timmar skapas projekt utifrån deltagarnas egna önskningar och drömmar. Det kan handla om spel eller andra program. Syftet med Hackerklubben är att göra männ...

WP:Global?

The "Neutral Point of View"-policy is one of the fundamental principles of Wikipedia; the strive for a "Global Perspective" is vital for the policy to be fulfilled. Aiming for "free access to the sum of all human knowledge", Wikipedia constitutes ...

Post-Snowden Crypto

The evidence of the unexpected scale of global surveillance by the western agencies introduces a new more powerful adversary into the classical crypto threat model where the adversary is mostly pictured as "Mallory". Let's reassess existing crypto...

Test Driven Development For Arduino

How to work with Test Driven Development for the embedded hardware. The talk will show one way how to combine host side testing with development for the Arduino.

The Logics for Terms of Services and their Usefulness for Automation

Workshop following the talk --
This talk will outline my approach to automatically reading Terms of Services contracts by a computer and checking user-defined properties on the read ToS.

The seed for this project was the talk of Hugo Roy (tosdr.org) from FSCONS 2012 which gave me the idea for a really useful application of the research that I have been doing on Logics for Legal Contracts; the application is to help common Internet service users to deal with (read/understand/verify) the multitude of ToS that they encounter throughout their Internet experience.

This project has three main aspects:
(1) is the more established techniques for how to read ToS texts/language (in possibly multiple language variants) and to build a logical structure that a computer could manipulate;
(2) involves, still to be improved, logics for legal contracts that are meant to be the basis for a computer to really understanding the meaning of the text that it read, the various notions that the text contains, and the many implications and connections;
(3) is the implementation of a system to help users with their daily readings of ToS, necessarily involving human experts, and with a slow convergence to a mostly automated reading and verification process.

For the first part there are good technologies like the Controlled Natural Language Attempto from Zurich and support for m...

Across a wall of mist and sunshine: uploading the cultural heritage while still following Swedish copyright law

The Swedish government has asked galleries, libraries, archives and museums to make the cultural heritage available to everyone, but copyright law is difficult to interpret and leads to bizarre consequences when applied to older works. In the regi...

Local action and world politics

Former Telecomix member Stephan will give a short summary of what Telecomix did during the uprisings in North Africa, from Tunesia to Egypt, from Lybia to Syria and even beyond. A personal insight in a time of turmoil and the question: Was it poli...

Make Space

A story about building a collaboratory based on a hacker/DIY philosophy, with references to some global places and ending with a discussion with the participants.

Linguistics as Open Source Code

How to design and develop linguistics as open source code. How to do it in practice, examples of methods and tools, such as spellcheckers for OpenOffice.

12:00 Linguistics as Open Source Code. How to repeat "Project
Linux" for language technology (en)

Language technology will be and is partially already an important
part of the computing ecosystem: everything from keyboard
layouts, Unicode and fonts to machine translation and speech
recognition fall under this umbrella. At present, much of the
language technology is only available for a small group of
languages, which serves to further consolidate the digital divide
that exists today. As most of the languages outside the digital
world today are the small and economically irrelevant language
communities, the only possible way out of this situation is going
open source, and repeat what Linus Torvalds did for general
computing in the area of language technology.

But is it possible? Or is natural languages more complex than a
computer OS? Building a complex operative system based upon
anarchistic cooperation on the web was unthinkable in 1990, still
it was done a decade later. When it comes to language technology,
the task of letting the computer take structure and meaning into
account when process natural language, the issue is still open.

In this presentati...

The Wikipedia gendergap and what we're trying to do about it

Ever since we got confirmation of our suspicions that women were massively underrepresented as Wikipedia editors, the Wikimedia community has strived to decrease the gendergap. This talk will present some of our initiatives, outline what has worke...

Engineering our way out of Fascism

TBA

Erik and Erik

Why is free software important in education?

Education, especially higher education (also PhD) is tightly connected to computers and software on them. We need an operating system to use computer with possible peripheral devices, several different applications to work at our everyday academic...

Schools needs to teach not only subjects like natural sciences, history, languages and others but also being a good member of their society. Using FOSS one can look inside the code and learn from it and share that code with others without violating the law. In fact, it is encouraged to help spread the software freedom and FOSS. When you share the software, you can help others to get their computers to work and jobs done. In this way schools can raise a helpful, responsible, competent generation familiar with free tools available on the Internet. FOSS can be also adopted to better fit your needs via open source code. You even don't need to know programming when you just would like to e.g. translate it.
Whenever you're using proprietary software then you may not share it, because its licence forbids it. Also, the source code is closed and you can't look inside the code and understand what this software does. You probably don't know but hidden „treasures“ can do very bad things inside the proprietary software. Also, important data can be locked into proprietary data formats and cannot be freely open with FOSS (aka vendor lock-in). The cost of proprietary software can be quite s...

An Open Source Infrastructure for Language Technology

15:15 An Open Source Infrastructure for Language Technology.
Design parameters for such an infrastructure, and Giellatekno as
an example (en)

In the previous talk we presented why we need a crowd-sourced and
open-sourced approach to language...

An essential part of building a language technology
infrastructure "for the rest of us" is reuse and flexibility.
Most of the languages not covered by existing language technology
do not have computer programs with an ability to process text or
speech in their language. Making such programs is not an easy
task: The dominating languages combine an abundance of accessible
text resources with an impoverished inflectional structure.
Methodologies for these languages capitalise upon this, and use
statistical and list-based methods where the primitives are the
words (character strings between spaces). The majority of the
languages of the world are in the opposite situation, and combine
a paucity of textual resources with a rich morphological
structure, ranging from 8 forms of each noun in Scandinavian to
more than thousand forms of each verb in Finnish. An on top comes
the productive compounding of Northern Europe.

We will present the infrastructure and tools used and developed by
the Divvun and Giellatekno groups at the University of Tromsø to
develop proofing tools, localisation, intelligent language
learning resources and other linguistic resources for almost 40...

OpenStreetMap – how we switched license

This will be a brief summary of how OpenStreetMap, the free map who anyone can edit, changed license of the data. The project was founded in 2004 and the data was licensed under a Creative Commons license. However, after a few years it appeared th...

DebianParl, Catmandu and ACTA

In the past, the fight against ACTA have been severely challenged by all the work done in secret. Much time was spent putting together the puzzle: Each revision came in a new shape - differently styled Word document, different PDF export, and may...

A healthy public debate need reliable sources. But also it needs reliable interpretations of the date contained in those sources.

DebianParl is a project to optimize Debian for parliamentary workers.
One area is handling documents in the decision making process.

Catmandu is a framework for handling and refining libraries - catalogues of documents.

In the DebianParl project, we use Catmandu to streamline distilling non-biased facts from the mess of (e.g. leaked) artifacts, to separate the noise of prior sloppy (or even deliberate obfuscating) document handling from the relevant disagreements.

Goal is to enhance the political debate.

DebianParl: https://wiki.debian.org/DebianParl

Catmandu: http://librecat.org/

ACTA: http://en.act-on-acta.eu/Main_Page

Human Rights Perspectives on Intellectual Property Problems

We all know that there are many things wrong with the intellectual property law regime and that it is in different ways unsuitable for today's society. Finding convincing arguments to influence policies and laws is a must. International Human Righ...

Copyright as a law and a mindset is today receiving increasing criticism from many different perspectives. Some of them are rather intuitive, - based on the general understanding of freedom in a liberal society - some are economic, sociological, etc. The idea of claiming human rights to stop the expansion of copyright is not a new one either. Freedom of expression has long been a flagship for many anti-copyright movements, especially in the U.S.
International Human Rights law, however, is an indivisible body of specialised international law norms, aimed at expressing and protecting the very core of human existence – his or her dignity. In the discussion about copyright there is a group of human rights we have to take into consideration. Among them not only the right of freedom of expression, the right to education, the right to participate in cultural life, but also the authors’ right to benefit from protection of their moral and material interests. All of them have to be protected.
What kind of balance do human rights offer when implementing these rights? How does/should it influence the copyright law? During this talk I will try to answer these questions and will encourage...

Open source morphologies and crowd-sourcing lexicography

From Tommi Pirinen:

Recent themes or questions in my research such
as crowd-sourcing lexicography and productising
scientific ideas into parts of commonly used software
(e.g. in my latest case spell-checkers).

From Tommi Pirinen:
Recent themes or questions in my research such
as crowd-sourcing lexicography and/or productising
scientific ideas into parts of commonly used software
(e.g. in my latest case spell-checkers).
The basic technicalities of finite-state methods will
be summarized.

The crowd-sourcing and aspects of lexicography that I deal
with are concerned about how much native speakers and
language learners with no special skills could be able to
contribute to data driven language technology.

How and why I ended up at the Eurovision Song Contest in Malmö

A presentation of some of the photo projects done by wikipedians. Projects that Wikimedia Sverige likes to brag about. The presentation will feature high quality photos and video of Nobel prize winners, contestants in the Eurovision Song Contest ...

Designing an open source robot

A introduction talk about how to make a hobby robot. It will go through the basics of designing a basic DIY autonomous robot.

The talk will give an overview og my BalpBotOne robot project. What I leavened and how to think about your first hardware design.

Open source morphologies and crowd-sourcing lexicography

From: Tommi Pirinen:
Recent themes or questions in my research such
as crowd-sourcing lexicography and/or productising
scientific ideas into parts of commonly used software
(e.g. in my latest case spell-checkers).

While part 1 dealt with the crowd-sourcing and aspects of lexicography concerned about how much native speakers and language learners with no special skills could be able to contribute to data driven language technology, this part 2 will deal with productication aspects, including technical details in
deployment, dealing with distributions, their standards
vs. the general quality of (niche) scientific software and
so forth.

Universal Basic Income – can we get paid for being?

To end the culture of stress, loneliness and depression we need to look at what kind of lives we want to live. It is clear that the majority of people want to spend more time with friends and loved ones and less on working. Especially with job's t...

Writing Wikipedia articles by the million

A project for creating Wikipedia articles for all living species in several different languages is currently in progress. The project uses bot software to read biological databases and convert database entries to human-readable articles about each...

Lightning Talks - Session 2

Section 1: 3*10 minutes
Section 2: 6*5 minutes

Social Event

Social Event Continued