Safe as Milk

Mail to warm the cockles

I got a mail today from a Libre Graphics Meeting attendee (hope he doesn’t mind me republishing part of it) and it’s put me in a good mood for the day, I think.

The Meeting was a resounding success especially for every second that
one projects developer spoke to another.

Thanks to things that happened and inspired at the conference massive
progress is being made.

For example,Inkscape is now depending on Little CMS for build as Jon
implements named colors. We’re also now saving out XCF files of Inkscape
SVG files that include gimp layers and using gimp palettes across both
applications thanks to a little symlinking on build. Its a digital
artists dream come true.

LGM has also inspired new contributors to participate and previous ones
to direct their efforts to fulfil common needs. All because we got
multiple cooperative projects in the one room.

Pet peeve

Why do Americans utilize the word “utilize”, rather than the less pretentious and simpler “use”?

Nice story on GNU/Linux migration

Via Marcus Bauer on the marketing list: An art professor gets his students using free software.

There are some gotchas for using external devices like scanners and tablets, but all in all, it’s a nice mix of GTK+ and QT applications which just goes to show that at least in this domain, we’re not in competition with KDE.

Speaking of conferences…

For those who have forgotten, the closing date for the submission of GUADEC abstracts is really soon.

You can submit an abstract directly on the GUADEC web site (after creating an account). The deadline for submissions is the 31st of March, and since the conference is now only 3 months away, you might want to get a move-on.

You can have a look at the existing list of abstracts on the site too to get ideas. Just search for all articles with the “Presentation” type.

The end of an adventure

So, the Libre Graphics Meeting is over.

No matter how much you do for a conference, there’s always more you could have done. I have had people sending me mail all weekend saying that they heard about the conference too late to come – all I can say is that this conference was such a success that there will definitely be a second act next year, somewhere around the world, so you’ll have another chance.

Over 3 days, we had an experiment in conference planning. To make things a little easier for us, we arranged for the GNOME CVS to SVN migration to be sabotaged, but in revenge the GNOME hackers persuaded Lyon’s tram drivers to go on strike on the day of the conference.

We had some really great presentations (all I can say about Xara is “Wow!”), and with people like Carl Worth and Bdale Garbee coming along to hang out for the weekend, there were lots of thought provoking conversations flying around.

For the first two days, the presentations created a central theme to the conference, and allowed people to get a decent overview of some of what’s happening in the various projects. And then on Sunday, the “unorganised” day, we had around 20 sessions on things like the Create project, running Photoshop plug-ins under Linux (without Wine, I think), documentation around the graphics applications, collaboration between Xara and Inkscape, FontForge and the Open Font Lincence, a bunch of Blender workshops but the very cool Rui Campos, and more (my head was hurting at one stage trying to figure out what was going on). It was just the right side of uncontrolled chaos, and it was enormously beneficial to all who attended.

And lots of people came. I was estimating between 200 and 300 people, and we were in that range over the three days, with over 150 people each day on Friday and Saturday.

But we didn’t want this to be a huge conference. The best thing, in my opinion, about the conference was the time we gave people to meet and talk, and the greatest compliment someone could make about the conference would be that they came away with more friends afterwards than before.

Here’s to next year’s organisers. The discussion about who will host the conference next year will be happening on the Create mailing list, which you can find on freedesktop.org – and anyone who has a blog, and works in creative free software applications, send rejon or bryce your RSS feed and get added to the blogroll at create.freedesktop.org.

Oh, and a small side note to say “Up Ireland!”

Can’t stand waiting

Heady times.

I’ve been away from home with work quite a bit over the past few months, but I’ve still found time to get the conference (http://www.libregraphicsmeeting.org for those who haven’t been paying attention) more or less organised.

We will have t-shirts. We will have goodie bags. We will have conferencees. We will have a big mess tryoing to figure out how to manage workshops, demos and BOFs. We will have food & drink. We will even have name badges!

I’m in that twilight state where you’ve put a lot of work into something, and you’re not sure how it’s going to go down. Will it be a roaring success or a giant flop? Will everyone (or most people) come away happy or annoyed at having wasted a weekend? I can’t wait, but I’m a little nervous all the same. I just want to get to Friday morning.

Now, I’ll just need to throw together a presentation to open the conference. In an hour between putting the kids to bed and leaving home to go away with work (again) this week. Thankfully, there has been a great team involved in the conference so far, so the last minute organisation and set-up is in good hands.

See you all in Lyon next week.