Comments from the rusty cage

Travel plans

Meike Reichle — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 21:18:42 GMT

I'll be on the road a lot in the coming weeks. All events (except our anniversary of course) are conferences and thus excellent coffee/beer/key signing possibilities. If you'd like to meet up, drop me a note by mail or irc.

11./12. June 2009: CBLOS'09, Flensburg, Germany
26.-28. June 2009: Off to the Harz mountains to celebrate our first wedding anniversary
17.-24. July 2009: ICCBR-2009, Seattle, WA, USA
25.-31. July 2009: Debconf 9, Cáceres, Spain

Chemnitz Linux Days 2009

Meike Reichle — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 22:14:24 GMT

This is my fourth CLT report and they surely are becoming repetitive! But every good event deserves a good report, so here goes:

Contrary to previous years we already arrived on Friday this year. Since we were also not up for another stint with the gym (Aaah the sissifying effects of marriage!) we booked a room with a nice little guesthouse about 15 bus-minutes from the venue.

The conference was great as ever:

Speakers, booth personel and visitors were taken very good care of, there was nothing left to be desired
Organisation was exicellent, no (noticable) technical difficulties, no scheduling problems, a helpful staff member literally every 5 meters
A broad variety of very well-chosen talks from total beginner's to very sophisticated topics
Several accompanying social events including the 2nd Night of Free Films
A broad variety of exhibitors from small to large projects, both commercial and non commercial. CLT manages very well to be a community event that feels fun and almost like a family meeting but at the same time instills a sense of seriousness and respectability

I usually visit the CLT mostly for networking but I also managed to see a few talks. I moderated the session on High Performance and got to see three very nice talks on GPU programing, cluster computing and parallel programming.

This year also featured the first talk on (the lack of) women in Free Software. Unusually enough this one was even given by a man. I was quite curious about that talk, which was (how fitting!) scheduled in direct succession to my own. I am kind of torn on that topic myself. On one hand women in Free Software is a topic that is very important to me and deserves any attention it can get. On the other hand instead of talking about how evenly capable women are in Free Software I'd rather just demonstrate it, for instance by giving a good Free Software related talk. And instead of talking about how there should be more women in Free Software I'd rather just be one and try to encourage others with my example. The usual quota of female speakers at linux events is somewhere between 2-4% and I just don't like the idea of having a conference with n men talking about Free Software and 1 woman talking about women. I've had these settings before and it just doesn't sit well with me. Because of this I was quite please to find the topic being tackled by a man this time.
The talk itself, in my impression, left a few open issues though. It was rather brief and focussed mainly on stating the usual numbers, asserting that the Women in FLOSS movement wasn't about affirmative action or discriminating men and explaining how women feel discriminated by sexist behaviour and advertising and how objection to such things should not be mistaken as prudery. It's general advice on how to improve the quota of women in FLOSS mostly boiled down to the linuxchix slogan "Be Polite. Be Helpful.". What I missed most was practical advice to projects wishing to attract more female contributors, such as mentoring programs or low-threshold entry points. Also I felt that the talk lacked a real motivation beyond "gender balance is a Good Thing". However, I was glad the topic finally found its way into the CLT as well and I had a couple of very interesting discussions afterwards.

Concerning my own talk I was rather satisfied as well. Attendance was - as usually in Chemnitz - very good, according to the organisers I got around 200 people. Since I designed the talk as a collaborative project and its feedback was predominantly good I'll continue developing it with the feedback I got and submit it again to other events. I think the topic is very worthwile and there's still a lot in it. Some people asked for a more collaborative way of contributing their thoughts and ideas so I'll just create a wiki to collect the new ideas. I'll of course announce it here as soon as it's in place. The slides and audio recording (both German) are as usually available from the talks page at CLT or my own talks section.

Release consequences, as seen at CLT'09

Meike Reichle — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 15:34:11 GMT

Hey Martin, I think you better get that new edition finished real quick!

Translation:

Book: The Debian System, incl. official Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 sarge on DVD
Sign: Help yourself! A gift from: Open Source Press

Picture taken at Chemnitzer Linuxtage 2009.

Looking for free projects!

Meike Reichle — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 17:47:55 GMT

Dear all, I am currently assembling a talk that discusses if and how the principles of free software can be applied to topics beyond operating systems and software. The first things that come to mind are surely the Creative Commons, free music, free films, free books etc. but I am sure that there is more, also even beyond the digital world.

I already know a couple projects but I am looking for many many more! So, what examples do you know for applications of the free software philosophy that go beyond the usual software/OS area? I'd be happy for any hints, urls, projects, authors, bands, names etc. that come to your mind!

To contact me, simply drop me an e-mail or prod me on irc (alphascorpii on OFTC and freenode).

How to know ...

Meike Reichle — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 20:54:18 GMT

In response to Lior:

How to know you're dating a free software guy?

You can recognize you're dating a free software guy by:

You've finally found someone who shares your interests.
He knows it is called GNU/Linux.
He understands why you refuse to talk via gTalk, MSN or icq.
His browser of choice is called Iceweasel, as is yours.
He likes to attend your talks at Open Source conferences.

And the #1 way is:

You've finally found a guy who stands above stereotyping women as technically and technologically ignorant.