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Support the Libre Graphics Meeting!

In only two years, the Libre Graphics Meeting has become a hugely important meeting place for free software graphics developers. With surveys showing that the main gaps in the Linux desktop offering now are graphics applications (Photoshop, Illustrator, Visio, AutoCAD), the conference becomes even more vital to the advancement of the free software desktop.

A few weeks ago, I got a heads-up from the Libre Graphics Meeting organisers that we weren’t doing so well on the sponsorship front as we have in the past. The major cost center for the conference will be subsidising travel and accommodation for volunteer developers who could not otherwise attend.

And so, today, we launch a fundraising campaign! With the help of Pledgie and the GNOME Foundation we have set an ambitious but necessary target – we hope to raise $20,000 in community donations over the next two weeks.

For those who appreciate the projects that this conference supports (including Inkscape, Scribus, GIMP, Blender, Krita, Open Clipart, …) and have been looking for a way to support them, then please give generously. And spread the word! To get the word out, embed the following in your webpages:

Thank you all for your support.

What was I smoking?

That’s the only question I can think of when I come across this gem, from the wiki page collecting demos for Libre Graphics Meeting 2006 (I’ve put an archive of the old LGM page back online, minus the MySQL database which had the news items):

So, you’re an artist, and your favourite program (or combination of programs) isn’t in the programme. Why not offer yourself up as a sacrificial lamb on the altar of demos?

In Greek mythology, Deimos was the god of dread or panic, which seems strangely appropriate.

The word demonstration comes from the latin demonstrare, to explain completely. Monstrare in turn comes from monstrum, meaning “divine omen or wonder”. So we can think of a demonstration as a demystification.

The word shares its roots with monster, meaning something we don’t understand.

So demonstrations are dreadful affairs where we demystify monsters.

If you feel up to the task of scaring off other people’s monsters with a big flashlight, sign up here to give a demo. It could be as simple as using Blender to create an animation, or as complicated as drawing a square in the GIMP.

Can’t remember what I was up to when I wrote that, but it must have been late…

The adventure continues

After my initial organisation of the Libre Graphics Meeting in Lyon last year, Louis DesJardins in Montreal valiantly volunteered to carry the torch on to 2007 – planning for this year’s conference is going nicely now (at least, now that we’ve sorted out a website, and gotten all the DNS issues ironed out, thanks to Craig Bradney, Peter Linnell and Andy Fitz).

The line-up is looking good, and Louis has out-done himself (and certainly out-done me) with the amount of stuff organised. I’m very impressed.

This morning brought me another pleasant surprise – not only has the torch been carried on, but the idea virus has spread the conference beyond its original frontiers to Brazil – as part of FISL 8.0, some Grazilian Free Culture, Free Software and Free Art nuts will be organising the Libre Graphics Meeting Brazil. Rock!

Lyon for GUADEC

So – the Lyon candidature was submitted earlier today, and thanks to some magnificent work over the Easter weekend from Vincent Untz and Oscar Figuieredo (especially Oscar), it was looking rather spiffy.

The final copy is online at http://dneary.free.fr/lyon-guadec.pdf (.odt for the OOo source). The introduction summarises why I think Lyon is a good candidate:

Lyon is a great city for this conference for a number of reasons. First, the city itself is young, vibrant, beautiful, and well placed in Europe. Second, the GNOME and free software communities are particularly active in the region. Thirdly, CPE Lyon, the host university, knows the free software community, and has fantastic facilities. It is the ideal location for this kind of event.

Did I mention the food? Lyon is a great place to eat – just ask the people who came here in March for the Libre Graphics Meeting.

It goes without saying that as supporters of this candidature, myself and Vincent Untz will not be taking any part in the decision which town will host.

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.

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.

LUGRadio

I gave an interview last night to Jono and the boys on LUGRadio about the Libre Graphics Meeting.

I don’t think I was particularly good – I was a bit scattered, which probably reflects the conference, and I’m not sure I got the core points across – getting artists and developers together and learning from each other, getting developers working together from different projects, sharing a passion and love for free software with a bunch of people we don’t meet very often.

That’s what you get for doing interviews after 10pm, after a 10 hour working day and a board meeting.

Anyway, we’ll see how it sounds after it’s passed through the magic remixing fingers of Mr. Bacon et al.

"Conferences suck"

Jeff Jarvis on conferences:

Too many conferences suck […] They are all about speeches and not about conversation and argument and learning and meeting. They don’t capture the expertise of the crowd.

Reading this gives me great pleasure, since the Libre Graphics Meeting is all about conversation and argument and learning and meeting. The last bit’s even in the name, it’s so important.

So most of the great, exciting stuff that’s going to happen at the conference, you won’t find on the schedule.

Carl Worth is coming along to meet people interested in Cairo. A contingent from HP’s imaging team will be popping in to get their kit working better with free software. Rui Campos is going to give a 5 hour workshop on Blender. The GIMP developers are going to have a meeting. The Scribus developers are all going to meet for the first time in real life. A bunch of Inkscape developers are coming along to have a laugh and work with a group from Xara.

I’ve never been so excited about a conference. It’s going to be passionnate people from different projects, all in the same place, scribbling their notes and designs and explanations on beermats and paper serviettes, but also, thanks to the fact that there will be time during the conference when there are no planned presentations, perhaps they’ll be scribbling on whiteboards, laptops and paper.

The community, work + pleasure, community aspect of a conference is also something I want to be important for GUADEC this year, and with Quim at the helm, we’re well on our way.

Oh – and listen out for a quick bit on the Libre Graphics Meeting during the last episode (right at the end) of LUGRadio, season 3, episode 8, in all good websites now.

LGM registration is open!

Registration for the Libre Graphics Meeting is open. We debated for a while whether a registration page was really worth it, since the conference is free and open to attend.

We came to the conclusion that it was, if only to give us an idea how many people were coming, so that we could order roughly the right amount of t-shirts, conference packs and sandwiches.

One conspicuous absence is an “I need accommodation” field – we are not going to organise accommodation. We should have a list of hotels, and a block booking in a youth hostel, in the next couple of weeks, though. Lyon is quiet in mid-march, so it’s probably not something people need to worry too much about yet.

So – if you’re coming to LGM, please come & register! We won’t spam you (honest!) and you’ll be helping us out.