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= Notes from Libre Planet 2013 =

March 23-24, 2013

= Negotiation Theory for Geeks =

''Leslie Hawthorne''

How do you keep your community welcoming to new people, and to people
who are already involved? In the most successful projects, people
communicate well and achieve mutual goals through
negotiation. Negotiation doesn't have to be complicated. For example,
deciding which bugs to fix first is an act of negotiation.
Negotiations can be easy or hard, depending on (1) whether you and the
other party have a good (bad) relationship, and (2) whether you and
the other party have aligned (unaligned) interests.

Harvard sponsored something called the Harvard Negotiation
Project. One of the project outcomes was a series of books, including
Getting to Yes.

We have a tendency to pre-judge difficult conversations (i.e., "this
is gonna suck"). Try to avoid pre-conceived notions of how the
negotiation will proceed.

Ask for what you need. Ask the other party what they need. Once you've
done this, concentrate on finding common ground; things you both agree
on. Then try to reach agreement. Try to find the most optimal solution
for both parties.

It's okay if you can't reach an agreement, of if agreeing to disagree
is the best you can do. Preserve your options for having a positive
dialog in the future.

Diplomacy is understanding the needs of your audience.

Interests are our goals. Positions are how we believe we can achieve
those goals. Focus on outcomes more than positions. Explore different
paths towards achieving those outcomes. If you don't like your slice
of the pie, then try to make a bigger pie.

It's better to win than to be right. Don't sacrifice long-term
relationships for the sake of short-term goals (i.e., being
right). Difficult conversations can actually help build relationships.

A positive "no" is better than no agreement at all. Again, the
emphasis is on compromising, and trying to preserve relationships.

Once you reach an agreement, try to solicit commitment. Talk about
next steps. Make sure people understand what's expected of them. When
things don't happen, don't be afraid to call them out gently.

Listen to other's viewpoints. Paraphrase what they're saying (to make
sure you've understood it properly). Acknowledge their interests.

The best organizers are the ones that care about their projects, and
the people in their community.

There's a big difference between being right about goals, and being
right about tactics.

Confrontation is not the same as negotiation. You should know
beforehand when you're walking into a confrontation, vs. walking into
a negotiation.

Resources:

* Speakers website. http://hawthornelandings.org
* Center for non-violent communication. http://cvnc.org

= 3D Printing =

''Aeva Palecek''

The Lulzbot TK-0 is a 3D printer.

Slicer (aka "slic3r") is a 3D slicing program. Slicer takes a 3D
model, and creates a series of cross-sections ("slices"), which are
parallel to the print bed. 3D printers print one slice at a
time. Slicer translates a 3D model into a series of primitive printer
commands. The printer command language is called "gcode".

What can you do with a 3D printer? They're slow, and they generally
print in plastic. They're good for prototypes, but not the best choice
for mass production. Aside from plastics, there are print materials
based on wood and rubber, and even a few edible materials (sugar and
chocolate).

http://devel.lulzbot.com is Lulzbot's developer website. There, you'll
find design specifications and plans for their 3D printers.

There are groups working on 3D scanners, to go along with 3D printers.

Some groups are experimenting with metallic printing materials, like
copper and silver. This would allow you to print circuit boards,
discrete components, and even 3D printer parts.

3D printing takes three programs: one for 3D modelling, slicer, and a
program to communicate with the printer (i.e., to send gcode to the
printer). it would be nice to have better integration between these
three types of programs.

What should you consider when buying a 3D printer? Look at print
samples, materials the printer is capable of working with, and the
size of the print bed. Be sure to get a demo before buying.

Two things affect printer resolution: the nozzle size (which affects
line width), and layer thickness. Line size is more important for
small objects, less important for small ones. Z-axis steps are
discrete; x- and y- axis are continuous.

There are two common types of plastics: ABS and PLA. Overall, the cost
of a job is most influenced by the printed object's volume.
reprap.org is a good source for learning about gcode.

Resources:

* http://slic3r.org
* http://www.botqueue.com
* http://reprap.org
* http://mediagoblin.org

= Free Software Communities and the Cloud =

''Dave Neary''

The Linux kernel is everywhere: smart phones, the data center,
embedded devices, and supercomputers.

Back in the 1940's, the president of IBM believed that there was a
market for perhaps five computers. That's become true in a way: our
five computers are Amazon, Google, Facebook, and pick two others. It
boils down to "I no longer have control over my computing", which has
its advantages and disadvantages.

Many companies host platforms as a service, or software as a
service. You're going to pay for these services, but it's not always
obvious how you're paying for them.

Some projects have become ecosystems of companies rather than
ecosystems of communities. In general, when you're closer to the
cloud, you get more corporate contributors; when you're closer to the
desktop, you get more individual contributors.

The cloud's value comes from the scale of the computing
infrastructure, or from the number of people using the service. But
where is user freedom in the cloud?

Mobile companies are very much against GPLv3. They do not want users
changing software on their smartphones; instead, they'd prefer to lock
their phones down. Android is not "free" in any meaningful sense of
the word. We're teaching users that they're supposed to be helpless -
it's to hard to administer your own device, so you should let us do
that administration for you.

:The best way to control people, and to really control them, is to take away a little bit of their freedom at a time. To erode their rights by a thousand tiny, and almost imperceptible reductions.
:- Adolph Hitler

So where do we go from here? We can use toys to teach children the joy
of hacking. This could come from products like Kapla (wooden blocks),
electronic devices like Arduino, or programming languages like Sugar.
There are lots of creative toys that can teach children to hack.

Literacy used to be the domain of specific classes in society: nobles
and the clergy. Today, programming literacy is in a similar place.

Open devices: pirate box, Arduino.

Open Mobile platforms: Firefox mobile, cyanogen mod, salefish OS.

During the last ten years, we've seen a proliferation of free
software. We've also seen a decline in user's ability to control their
computing environment.

= Federated free software futures =

''Chris Webber and Evan Prodromou''

Have a look at beta.etherpad.org, and autonomo.us

pump.io is a social server with an activity stream API. It's a very
simple (but fast) pub/sub server. It defines social payloads between
two endpoints.

The W3C is working to standardize the ostatus protocol. The main
challenge is restricting access to federated posts. The standard
covers server-to-server protocols, but not client-to-server. There's
no problem with posts that are completely public; but there's not a
way to restrict access to a post once it's federated.

= Free software for a healthy democracy =

''Remy DeCausemaker and Paul Tagliamonte''

The Sunlight foundation is a DC-based non-profit. They do a lot of
work around government transparency. They're advocating for api-based
bulk access to government data.

The Sunlight Foundation has a project called Open States, where
they're attempting to scrape legislative data from all 50 states, and
place it in one normalized database. This is easier to do in some
states than others.

Open States had to be an open source project, with community
involvement. There are over 200 scrapers for state data. Each state
presents their data differently, requiring different programs to
interpret it. You can't do it all with a single scraper.

Civx.us aggregates documentation from public websites.

Each .gov organization has their own data representation, and their
own way of presenting that data.

New York state has APIs for data access. (I got the impression that
New York is the only state offering API access.)

A group in Germany has put all of their government's legislation into
a github repository. They use github to track revisions. They also
give people the opportunity to file bug reports against the
legislation.

Kansas publishes all of their state data as .odt files. They're making
an effort to use non-proprietary document formats.

In Mississippi, state websites are .xml documents with
stylesheets. They don't look terribly good, but machine access is
easy.

The sunlight foundation compiled a scorecard, to gauge how well each
state made data accessible. Massachusetts got an F. Roll call votes
are not published in a meaningful way. State web sites frequently have
broken links. Information is often inaccessible without
javascript. Data only goes back to 2009. See
http://openstates.org/reportcard.

When we scrape web sites, the output is stored in a git
repository. This makes it easy to see how the sites change over
time. It's also helps when debugging broken scrapers.

What can you do with this stuff? Run plagarism detection software over
all of the bills introduced in one year; look for similar legislation
that appears in different states.

There's a data set from the FEC, which shows campaign
contributions. You can go from bill, to lobbyist, to person that hired
the lobbyist, to political contributions that person made.

Some .gov sites have pubic git repositories of their own source code.

See http://gov.git.info.

GIS data is ubiquitous among states, for representing land parcels and
such.

All the tools we use as hackers can be used to hack government data.

See "code for america brigade".

= Free Software Awards Ceremony =

''Richard Stallman''

In the area of mobile computing, we see manufacturers building systems
on a chip, by licensing different portions of the circuitry from
different manufacturers. The circuitry is licensed as a black
box. Even the phone manufacturers don't know how the entire phone
works. We'll have to start reverse-engineering this stuff.

Some devices are designed to prevent you from modifying anything.

Our reverse engineering list is growing - this is where we need to
most help.

In the past, we could run free software on any computer. Now, we may
have to worry about building our own computers. Lots of hardware
requires binary blobs in order to function. Manufacturers might
provide them, but they don't provide specifications for what's in the
blob, or what it does.

Apple's Crap store doesn't allow free software. It's really a form of
(arbitrary) censorship.

If we give people more incentive to jailbreak their phones, then
they'll be more likely to push back against Apple. People should be
encouraged to break digital handcuffs.

Phones typically have two processors: a CPU, and a signal processor
for radio communications. In some phones, both of these processors
have full unrestricted access to memory. A remote update to the signal
processing software could easily change other parts of the phone.

This years awards:

* IPython
* OpenMRS (MRS = Medical Records System)

= Copyright and Internet Architecture: Where Have We Come Since SOPA/PIPA? =

''Wendy Seltzer''

According the classic story, copyrights are an incentive to create.

Who gets a say in how copyright laws are written? Mostly companies
that are involved in the copyright industry (e.g., the entertainment
industry). The public, and the users of copyrighted material tend not
to get a seat at the table.

Sony was taken to court in the 1980's for producing video cassette
recorders. The plantiffs argued that video recorders were instruments
of mass copyright violation. The court decided that video recorders
were okay, because they had many non-infringing uses. For example,
time-shifting broadcast television.

Today, the copyright term (for individuals) is the life of the author
plus 70 years. For corporate works, it's 90 years. The copyright term
extension act (CTEA) has been used to extend the duration of
copyrights.

The DCMA created safe harbors for ISPs, search engines, and hosting
providers. Services providers were not liable for the acts of
infringing users, provided that they responded quickly to takedown
notices.

There have been lots of copyright legislation introduced. Note the
number of bills that have "protection" in their name.

NET Act - no electronic theft act.

CBDTPA - Civil Broadband Digital Transmission Protection Act. Included
mention of a Broacast flag. Devices would have to shutdown recording
if a copyright bit was set.

HEPA - Higher Education Protection Act. Makes higher education funding
conditional; to receive funding, colleges must take steps to prevent
students from using the college network to copy copyrighted materials.

Google receives thousands of takedown notices a day. These are
requests to take down claimed infrigements. In 2012, Google was asked
to remove 55 million URLs that were alleged to infringe upon
copyright. Supposedly, many of these takedown requests were generated
mechanically. It's a case of bot vs bot.

See the Chilling Effects website (http://chillingeffects.org) for more
information on takedown notices. There's very little in the way of due
dilligence requirements for the submitter of a takedown notice.

Lots of material tends to be taken down and put back up again. Popular
works tend to reappear. Individual political speech tends to be
silenced.

The most recent development is the "six strikes" rule for copyright
infringement. The six strikes don't necessarily exclude fair
use. Strikes can be time-consuming and expensive to appear. How might
this affect, say, open wifi access points at restaurants or coffee
shops?

The Free Software foundation takes advantage of copyright laws (e.g.,
the GPL). But we need a more balanced system.

Copyright does not include replicating processes or functions.

What would happen if we sent our legislators emails, referencing links
to copyrighted works? How many strikes could we socially engineer?

= Creative Commons and Wikimedia: Designing Systems to Support Free Knowledge =

''Kat Walsh''

The Wikimedia Foundation is supported by a staff of about 150
people. All of the content is published using CC-by-SA licenses.

Wikipedia was a big participant in anti-SOPA protests. The anti-SOPA
protests were a temporary victory; but the ideas behind SOPA aren't
dead.

We are the content industry.

Early on, the Mediawiki foundation developed a mission statement. The
mission statement has helped guide our decisions over time. For
example, we wanted to show the world what was possible with free
content. The more that something affects you, the more it should
represent your interests.

Wikipedia represents the fights and inaccuracies of the world around
us.

Wikipedia is explicit in its use of free licenses. This is rooted in
the values of free software and free culture. Knowledge belongs to
the public.

Wikipedia has the goal of serving every human being. We don't do it
perfectly, but we're thinking about it.

Wikipedia strives for transparency and accountability. We want to be
as public as we can, so that people will trust what we do.

The foundation takes in ~ $50MM/year. The conditions by which we
distribute these funds are important. We've spent a lot of time
thinking about how to share them fairly.

The foundation shouldn't control the projects. The people who show up
to do the work should be allowed to do the work.

If your goal is to capture all of the world's knowledge, then you have
to spend a lot of time thinking about how to bring these voices in.

Many web sites have had to change their content to suit the demands of
their advertisers. Wikipedia avoids advertising to avoid the influence
of advertisers.

Failure is cheap. We can always keep trying.

All decisions have a cost. The important thing to consider is the
justification for that cost. What are the short term vs long term
costs related to your decision?

Creative Commons' goal was to create a set of licenses that are
adoptable, flexible, and representative of a large number of users.

Question: What about wiki federation? By federation, I mean the
ability to push content from one Mediawiki instance to another.

Not sure.

Question: Are there people treating Mediawiki articles as data?

Yes.

Question: Mediawiki is a great platform, but it can invite
spammers. How does Wikipedia deal with spam?

Most of the anti-spam solutions have come from outside the Mediawiki
Foundation. Most of the work is done by the community.

Question: How do you determine what kinds of projects are in-scope for
the Mediawiki foundation? What's your process for dispute resolution?

Most disputes are resolved quickly, but others are long and
heated. Disputes are resolved through a community process. We can use
mediation, arbitration, or just let the dispute carry on by
itself. Some issues are very controversial in the real world. It's
complicated, but things can get resolved.

Question: What's the status of the next generation of Creative Commons
licenses?

We're trying to improve the messaging behind the different licenses,
to give examples of who's chosen which licenses, and do give more
information about where each license is appropriate. We're trying to
make some Creative Commons licenses one-way compatible with the GPL.

Question: What about cultures with less of a literary tradition? For
example, cultures that rely more on oral communication?

We had something called the oral citation project, which was largely
the work of one individual on a fellowship. I'm not sure if anyone
else has taken the project up.

Comment: Higher education is being changed by the internet. Some
systems are open, while others are closed. Wikipedia is probably the
best example of what the internet is supposed to be. I'd like to see
the Mediawiki Foundation work more with higher education.

We have been working with universities and professors, to have
Wikipedia used as a resource for learning. It's a kind of media
literacy. You should treat Wikipedia like you'd treat a
newspaper. Read it critically.

http://simple.wikipedia.org/ - a section of Wikipedia, that's written
in simple (and usually nontechnical) english.

= Lightning Talks =

Lightning talks are short, informal talks that last for five minutes or less.

'''Metadata games'''. http://metadatagames.com. This is part of a
project to design games for social change. The game involves tagging
media. We've partnered with libraries for tagging audio and video
material. We're crowdsourcing information that would be valuable to
archivists.

'''Libre Planet Gaming Collective'''. Free software has gained a lot
of traction, but many people run non-free software, like games. There
are lots of resources behind non-free game development: programmers,
musicians, animators, graphic designers. Free game developers
generally don't have these resources available. Thanks to the FSF, we
have a gaming collective, and a server where we can run free
games. Chat with us via #libreplanet-gaming on freenode.

'''Metadata'''. The speaker was a fellow named Jonas, from the
Shuttleworth foundation. We made it easy to share digital works. Using
works can be a challenge - you have to keep track of license and
attribution compliance. We'd like a way to embed this kind of
information in images, etc, as metadata.

'''Tor Bridge and Cupcake Bridge'''. People have tried to make Tor
bridges. This is a daunting task to the average person. I've come up
with a way to use web browsers as Tor bridges. Right now, I've been
doing this by embedding bridges in Flash games, or running bridges as
Facebook apps. We need more people to write bridge software. This
allows people to run Tor in countries that block access to the Tor
network (e.g., China and Iran).

'''Collecting All Knowledge Yet to Be Learned.'''

'''Etherpad Lite and Mediawiki'''. Wikis were built for collaboration,
but the collaboration tends to happen external to the wiki. I'm
experimenting with developing a wiki editor based on Etherpad, so that
people can collaboratively (and concurrently) edit wiki pages. So far,
I've managed to embed Etherpad, and get it to handle simple mediawiki
markup. It's not perfect yet, and there are still a few bugs to work
out.

'''Ether Editor and Parasoid'''. We've lost wikipedia editors over
time. We're trying to find new ways to keep editors engaged. We're
working on better visual editors for Mediawiki. Wikitext html
translation is a challenge. Templates add another layer of
complexity. By the way, the Wikimedia foundation is hiring. See
http://jobs.mediawiki.org.

'''Pirate Party'''. We have a pirate party in Massachusetts. I've been
an FSF member since 2007, and many of the values that led me to
support Free Software also led me to support the Pirate Party. We
stand for Open Government, Open Innovation, and Open Culture. At the
moment, we're focused on local levels of government, and we need
people to run as candidates. Talk to me if you're interested, or visit
http:// masspirates.org.

'''Right to Own a Computer'''. Yesterday, Stallman gave a non-standard
talk. Starting in 2002-2003, a few manufacturers tried to push a
system called Palladium. Palladium was a system designed to give
hardware and operating system manufacturers root access to your
machine. Apple has done this brilliantly: it's too hard for you to
administer your own systems, so you should let us do it for you. If we
don't take action soon, we'll lose the formal and practical rights to
own our own computers.

'''foss.rit.edu'''. We're hacking the ivory tower from inside, and
bringing freedom to the students. For example, as a homework
assignment, we'll tell students to go find a bug and fix it. Any
bug. If the maintainers accept your patch, then you'll get extra
credit. While teaching students about FOSS projects, we discovered
that many students were interested in staying involved in the FOSS
community.

'''Jalview and Friends'''. Jalview is gene sequence analysis for
all. Bioinformatic data is not fun to read, so we need tools to help
us understand it. Jalview is the "Java Alignment Viewer". It's been
around since 1997, and open source since 1998.

'''Earthcube'''. Earthcube is an NSF-sponsored project to help
geoscience researches. The idea: to form an open-source social network
for people working in geosciences.

'''Hacking in the Arts'''. This is a success story of hacking in the
arts. When printing photos, you're locked into the manufacturer's
dithering algorithms, whether you like them or not. For a long time,
digital cameras were like this too. With free software and hand-loaded
printer inks, I can make much better prints than with the
manufacturer's stock products.

'''Challenges in Free Software Gaming Projects'''. I worked on one
project where we had no revision control, and our software was
exchanged by posting patches to a bulletin board. Eventually, poor
code quality caught up with us.

'''World Vista''. World Vista is a system that deals with veteran's
health records. It's similar (in goals) to the OpenMRS project, but
it's a different system. A Department of Defense (DoD) directive said
that the agency should "condsider free software", but the directive
didn't provide a way for DoD employees to participate and share with
the free software community. World Vista has used FOIA requests to get
the source code to the system (from the DoD). Medical records systems
are very lucrative for for-profit companies, and the for-profits try
to lock you in to using their software. Closed source vendors want the
VA and DoD to drop World Vista, in favor of their own proprietary
systems. World Vista has been around for a long time, since end-users
have been involved from day one.

= Defective by Design =

''Kxra''

Some companies have proposed adding DRM tags to the HTML5
specification. We call this the "Hollyweb".

Most content producers don't choose to use DRM. More often, the desire
to use DRM comes from the content distributors, like Amazon or
Netflix. Distribution is still locked down, and "regulated" by a small
number of big players.

Different countries have different copyright laws. This makes the idea
of adding DRM tags a real mess.

By itself, copyright is a commercial monopoly for publishers. It's not
necessary in the public interest. For most of history, copyright laws
didn't affect the public directly. Now, those laws affect the public
very directly.

The GTLD DNS servers are based in the US. This is a big problem for
many countries.

Many technical advances were hailed as democratizing the media: radio,
the internet. Then along came advertising.

There's a movement called "A2K" - access to knowledge. In the 1940's,
the UN declared that access to knowledge was a human right. Today,
focus on A2K is no longer discussed as a human right. Instead, we
discuss how much access should be disallowed.

See Aaron Schwartz's "Sharing is not Stealing".

Copyright was originally created to prevent publishers from publishing
each other's material, not to prevent people from sharing.

Many criticisms about copyright and IP restrictions happen to be very
appealing traits to capitalists.

Could capitalism develop an anti-DRM sentiment? Sure, if there was
strong opposition to DRM, then the removal of DRM could become a
selling point.

We shouldn't have to pay for the removal of anti-features.

For the vast majority of artists, publicity is the biggest
challenge. If piracy gets your work to more people, then it's
considered a plus. (Think Grateful Dead.)

Hey, the entertainment industry is pirating our culture.

Sharing is a basic element of human behavior. You can criminalize
human behavior, but that will only create more criminals. It won't
change what people do. The act of criminalization merely gives a small
group of people a tremendous amount of leverage against everyone
else. DRM is not a way to stop piracy; it's a way to monopolize media
distribution.

Proprietary Software = Tyrant Tech.

DRM is not just for music and videa; it also affects electronic
devices. Many DRM schemes are easy to hack, but don't assume that all
of them will be easy to hack.

How do we raise consciousness about DRM with people who are not
techies? This could be a matter of framing. It's not about piracy,
it's about sharing. We can find ways to make money out of free
culture.

Look for Defective by Design pages on the Libre planet wiki.

= Freedom to Organize Online: The CiviCRM Story (So Far) =

''Donald Lobo and Tim Otten''

A lot of free software goals come down to supporting personal
autonomy. In the civic Lilieu, there's also freedom of assembly, and
transparency.

Civic communities are small in size, and tend to have small
budgets. These folks are passionate about their cause, but they may
not have a lot of tech experience.

In 2004, we started working on a software package for
non-profits. This became the beginning of CiviCRM.

CiviCRM has a front-end interface for taking contributions, but most
of the application is a back-office system. Civi has a dashboard for
tracking contacts, engagements, and so fourth.

Drupal (as a CMS) works in conjunction with CiviCRM. CiviCRM has good
market penetration among organizations with less thatn $250k/year
budgets. Market penetration is smaller in large organizations. 83.3%
of CiviCRM users have annual budgets of less than $500k. We're trying
to get more large organizations to subsidize CiviCRM development,
since large organizations have the resources to do that sort of
subsidization.

59% of CiviCRM installations run in Drupal 7. 14% of them run inside
of Wordpress.

Civicon is an annual conference for US and UK CiviCRM users.

There are 4-7 developers who do most of the work on the project's
core.

CiviCRM financials. The organizations main costs are (1) salary for
5-7 staff, and (2) funding for sprints and conferences. Our philosophy
is to release early and release often. We prefer iteration over
perfection. We're very service oriented, and interested in responding
to user needs.

CiviCRM is built with PHP5, MySQL, jQuery, PHPUnit, Jenkins. On the
technical side of things, we're focusing on PHP5, Symfony, better
handling of financial data, and making components more
interchangeable.

CiviCRM provides its own internal API and module extension framework.

Hosting is a challenge for many organizations. If you lack the
technical expertise, we have partners to help with integration
projects. At some point, we'd like to develop ready-to-use system
images. We're looking for hosting strategies that can provide
economies of scale.

Salesforce provides a free package for non-profits with 10 members or
fewer.

Question: Does CiviCRM run side by side with your CMS, using its own
database?

Yes.

Question: What about payment handling?

You'll have to set up an account with a payment processor, and
configure CiviCRM to use that payment processor. Authorize.net,
Paypal, and Stripe are popular payment processors.

Question: Does CiviCRM have anything tailored towards satisfying FEC
reporting requirements?

CiviCRM doesn't have anything tailored specifically to FEC
requirements. But in general, the reporting features are pretty good.

= Closing Plenary: Idealism for Community Building =

''Karen Sandler''

Karen used to work at the Software Freedom Law Center.

For this talk, I feel like I'm preaching to the choir. But preaching
to the choir can be a good way to recharge your batteries.

The FDA does not review medical device code. The code isn't available
for review, if when the device is going to be implanted in your
body. (Karen has a defibrillator implant; she asked for a copy of the
device's source code, and the device manufacturer refused her
request.)

Gnome 3 is the default desktop in many distributions, the project has
many contributors, there are old and new community members, and
project development takes place in the open.

Over time, every project becomes a revolving door. Old people leave
and new people come in.

''The Debunking Handbook'' is a book of advice for correcting
myths. See http://www.skepticalscience. com. You can't simply dispel
a myth; you have to replace it with a fact. The challenge lies in
finding facts that are as compelling as the myths they're intended to
replace.

Instead of facts, you can also replace myths with ideals. Make
campaigns about ideals, not about tasks. For example, if you want to
add accessibility features to your project, then do a campaign about
the need for and benefits of accessibility.

There are proprietary products for accessibility, but many of these
are tied to license donations. They have all the usual drawbacks of
proprietary software.

The Gnome project is working on privacy; putting you in control of
your personal data.

How do you bring new voices into your project? There are several ways
to do this: outreach programs, sponsorships, internships. When you
bring more women into a project, the atmosphere changes. By improving
outreach efforts to women, we're actually improving outreach overall.

Marketing people are incredibly important to free software
projects. They can help you spread your ideals. Ideological goals can
unite us more than bad press can divide us. Be sure to say a kind word
for people working on free software.

Nonprofit culture and infrastructure is a different environment than
for-profit development.

Gnome is about to celebrate its 15th anniversary.

Question: What about new devices and new interfaces?

Gnome 3 was designed to accomodate touch devices. But free software
tends to move a little more slowly in supporting new hardware devices.

Question: What about all of the distributions that forked Gnome 3,
like Mint? Did this happen when Gnome 2 was released?

There was some backlash when gnome 2 was released. I'm not sure about
the forking.

[[Category: Notes]]

LibrePlanet 2013 - Revision history

SteveR: initial revision