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An astronaut floating above LibrePlanet.

Program

Keynote Speakers


A European Open Technology Fund: Building sustainable public funding for free software


Julia Reda

Julia Reda is a former European Parliament member, and cofounder of the European Union's Free and Open Source Software Audit (FOSSA) project. She is well known for her work on copyright reform and net neutrality. She is an affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, and a Shuttleworth Foundation fellow. Currently, Julia Reda leads the fundamental rights litigation project control © at the German Society for Civil Rights.



Machine agency: Infrastructure for creative automation

How can we harness the precision of machines for the creativity of individuals? Automation and computer control of machines is increasingly widespread. However, it's often employed for dull, dirty, or dangerous tasks. This is partially because setting up these systems is complex and time consuming. How can we instead lower the threshold to automation such that it can be employed for experimental and explorational practices? In this talk, I will describe my research group's machine designs, and perhaps more importantly, discuss the attributes that makes them buildable, tailorable, and extendable by others.


Nadya Peek

Nadya Peek develops unconventional digital fabrication tools, small scale automation, networked controls, and advanced manufacturing systems. Spanning electronics, firmware, software, and mechanics, her research focuses on harnessing the precision of machines for the creativity of individuals. Nadya is an assistant professor of Human-Centered Design and Engineering at the University of Washington where she directs the Machine Agency. She did her PhD at MIT, is on the board of the Open Source Hardware Association, is half of the design studio James and the Giant Peek, and plays drum machines and synths in the band Construction.



Ten years of empowering activists AND everyday people through free mobile software

From bringing OTR, Tor, GnuGP, FFMPEG and SQLCipher to Android, to developing and supporting apps like Orbot, Tor Browser for Android, Onion Browser, F-Droid, ChatSecure, Haven and more, we at Guardian Project have been pretty busy for the last decade. Through ups and downs, iterations and improvements, we have a lot of interesting stories to tell about where we've been, and where we are headed.


Nathan Freitas

Nathan is the founder and director of Guardian Project, an award-winning free software mobile security collaborative with millions of users and beneficiaries worldwide. Their most well known app is Orbot, which brings the Tor anonymity and circumvention network to Android devices, and has been installed more than 20 million times. In late 2017, he co-designed an app called Haven with Edward Snowden; Haven works as a personal security system that puts the power of surveillance back into the hands of the most vulnerable and under threat. His work on off-grid, decentralized, secure mobile communication networks, dubbed Wind, was originally imagined and workshopped while Nathan was a fellow at the Berkman-Klein Center in 2015. In 2018, Wind was selected as a finalist in the Mozilla-National Science Foundation "Wireless Innovation for a Networked Society (WINS)" Challenge.


Speakers


Introduction to CiviCRM

: Saturday 16:35 - 17:20 EDT
: Jupiter
: Free Software in practice

CiviCRM is free software that empowers thousands of nonprofits around the world. This session will provide an overview on what CiviCRM is, what it can do, and how organizations can use it to achieve their mission.

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Coleman Watts

Coleman Watts is the lead developer and product manager for the CiviCRM Core Team and is tasked with coordinating new developments within the platform. Prior to coming on to the Core Team, Coleman worked with various nonprofits to align their technology with their missions. He is the original author of several CiviCRM extensions, including Drupal Webform integration.



Gamifying education the libre way

: Saturday 12:55 - 13:40 EDT
: Neptune
: Free Software in practice

Gamification is a concept that has flourished in the digital age. By leveraging the high interactivity and enticing incentives of game design with tight feedback loops, difficult concepts can be absorbed with little effort. But can a complex and controversial topic such as climate change be transformed into a fun and exciting learning opportunity? In this talk, we will explore how the philosophy of free software has been used to do exactly that by showing what we did to create and modify our own game and discuss how it can be applied in empowering educators and students to gamify their own interests.

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Giselle Jhunjhnuwala & Charlie Koch

Giselle is an artist, self-taught programmer, and Outreachy alumna. They like to explore the intersections of art, science, and technology, and have been exclusively using free software in their practice for several years. They have worked in technology and at an import/export multinational company, which enabled them to travel back and forth between China and the US. In their spare time, they volunteer for various free software projects such as Mediawiki, crochet hyperbolic planes, knit elemental spectrum scarfs, and write songs about PGP. They have exhibited at a number of private and state galleries in China, as well as in the US.


Charlie Koch

Combining his work in graphic design, music production, film editing, and software development, Charlie is a true digital creative. Embracing technology as an extension of will, he champions the confluence of technology and art, and loves showing others how to do the same. He has contributed award-winning projects to digital media sites such as Filmaka.com and OverClocked ReMix, as well as showcasing his work on his own Web site.



Ingestum: A libre NLP document ingestion library

: Sunday 12:55 - 13:40 EDT
: Neptune
: Exploring Free Software concepts

Many NLP projects that depend upon the analysis of documents are impaired by the difficulty of transforming source material into a computer-readable format. For example, PDF files are designed for human consumption but can look like a bag full of words to a computer.
To address this problem engineers at Sorcero developed Ingestum, a library that is used to "devour" content sources, outputting a format that can be used for additional processing.
Ingestum has four main concepts:

  • Sources - common content sources that feed the ingestion process, e.g. PDF, HTML, PNG, WAV, Twitter, email, et al.
  • Documents - the intermediary and final states of a source during the ingestion process.
  • Transformers - a transformation function that can be applied a document, e.g. removing hyphens from a text document.
  • Conditionals - a logic conditional operation that can be use to modify the behavior of a transformer.
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Walter Bender, Martín Abente Lahaye & Juan Pablo Ugarte

Walter Bender is founder of Sugar Labs and maintainer of Music Blocks, free software projects in support of education.


Over the past ten years, Martín Abente Lahaya has contributed to projects that involve free software in areas such as the GNU/Linux desktop and education.


Juan Pablo Ugarte is Glade developer/maintainer and GNOME contributor and foundation member since 2005.



3NWeb: A Better digital world is possible

: Saturday 15:40 - 16:25 EDT
: Neptune
: Security

Monopolization and centralization decreases our resilience in unstable times. In this session, we present decentralized services designed around the principle of least authority: the 3NWeb free software protocols and client. 3NWeb use cases include encrypted messaging and storage, which we will demonstrate. The protocols can be run over anonymous networks such as Tor. We need to share our knowledge and collectively move our society to be more immune to crisis via increased deployment of free software. 3NWeb can help the world move one more step in that direction.

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Mikalai Birukou & Sean O'Brien

Mikalai Birukou is an expert in decentralized, privacy-by-design technologies, and is building the 3NWeb protocols to create a better and safer digital world. Mikalai is passionate about creating digital spaces where every person is in control of their own life.


Sean O’Brien is a Visiting Fellow at the Information Society Project, where he leads the Privacy Lab initiative, and is a former lecturer at Yale Law School (Cybersecurity LAW 20310). Sean is Principal Researcher at the ExpressVPN Digital Security Lab, Head Tutor of Oxford Cyber Security for Business Leaders, and the founder of PrivacySafe Technology Foundation.



Right to Repair

: Saturday 13:50 - 14:35 EDT
: Jupiter
: Social context

What if everyone had free access to a repair manual for everything they owned? Making repair accessible to everyone is the best shot we’ve got at reducing e-waste and starting to make our high-tech lives sustainable.
Right to repair is working to make that happen--to restore a small amount of freedom to the hardware world. We've introduced legislation in over 20 states and are pushing manufacturers to release schematics and security patches for embedded systems.
Learn the latest in the fight from one of the leaders of the movement. We're also in the midst of a big fight over the most evil section of the DMCA, the dreaded Section 1201 that bans breaking encryption on hardware that you rightfully own.

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iFixit .

Kyle Wiens is the CEO of iFixit, the free repair manual. He’s dedicated his life to defeating the second law of thermodynamics, a battle fought in the courtroom as often as in the workshop. The Right to Repair campaign has, so far, successfully legalized cell phone unlocking and tractor repair.



Making it Ours: Mapping the History of our Movements' Relationship to the Internet and Envisioning its Future

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: Workshops
: Workshop

Jamie McClelland, Alfredo Lopez & Jaime Villarreal

The cost of wide spread adoption of the corporate controlled internet is omnipresent surveillance, algorithmic racism, censorship and targeted manipulation of people of color. Are we ready to change? Can we envision people of color ownership of technology and community control grounded in social justice values?

Seasoned activists of the liberatory Internet movement will guide participants through an interactive time-line exercise: mapping the points in people of color movements’ histories that have shaped our relationship with the Internet for the last quarter century, exploring how we’ve used internet communications for movement resilience, and collectively strategizing what our future relationship should be. Technology is political and this exercise makes the case for the need of free software.

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Alice Aguilar

Alice is the Executive Director of the Progressive Technology Project, a nonprofit social justice movement technology organization. For over 25 years, Alice has focused much of her life’s work in supporting indigenous people’s rights, environmental justice, and reproductive justice issues. Alice’s current work involves leading the fight against racism and sexism in technology; working to bring women, LGBTQ people, and trans people of color into technology; and winning respect for the people of color already doing technology work within social justice movements.



Jami and how it empowers users

: Saturday 15:40 - 16:25 EDT
: Jupiter
: Free Software in practice

Jami is free software for universal communication which respects the freedoms and privacy of its users. Jami is an official GNU package with a main goal of providing a framework for virtual communications, along with a series of end-user applications for audio/video calling and conferencing, text messaging, and file transfer.
With the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, working from home has become the norm for many workers around the world. More and more people are using videoconferencing tools to work or communicate with their loved ones. The emergence of these tools has been followed by many questions and scandals concerning the privacy and freedom of users.
This talk gives an introduction to Jami, a free/libre, truly distributed, and peer-to-peer solution, and explains why and how it differs from all other existing solutions and how it empowers users.

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Amin Bandali

Amin Bandali is a free software activist, GNU maintainer, Savannah hacker/admin, and a volunteer webmaster for the GNU project. In relation to Jami, Amin is a GNU maintainer for Jami, and a free software consultant at Savoir-faire Linux, where he gets to work on various aspects of Jami, including hacking on the jami-gnome client, working with the maintainers of Jami packages in various GNU/Linux distributions such as Debian and Trisquel to help keep the version of Jami available in their official repositories up to date, and generally serving as a community liaison between the Jami core development team and the wider free software community around Jami. Outside work, Amin is a GNU Emacs diehard who uses Emacs for just about every imaginable computing task (as evidenced by him maintaining the ERC IRC client built into GNU Emacs), and organizes the EmacsConf conference with help from wonderful co-organizers and volunteers.



How to make more users love free software: Double the love, double the freedom

: Sunday 16:35 - 17:20 EDT
: Saturn
: Community

In past years, free software projects have increased their usability considerably. Still, one of the main reasons users with no technical background don't use many free software projects in their daily routine is that some projects don't offer good usability, which drives them into choosing proprietary solutions. This talk is a more mature follow-up to my talk "How to make more users love free software," where I'll give realistic ideas and applicable and simple solutions to improve free software projects' usability.

This session is a continuation on Clarissa's presentation from LibrePlanet 2020.

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Clarissa Borges

Clarissa is a software engineering student, interested in free software projects and UX research. She started contributing to GNOME during her Outreachy internship project, where she did usability research for some GNOME programs and fell in love with the community. Clarissa is currently running an initiative to introduce minorities to start contributing to free software, and is always evangelizing for caring about usability on free software projects.



An information theoretic model of privacy and security metrics

: Sunday 14:45 - 15:30 EDT
: Saturn
: Security

An information theoretic model of privacy and security metrics
- or - how I learned to stop worrying about password meters and love the dice

Since 2010, EFF has maintained a project dubbed Panopticlick, which aims to help users understand a technique called browser fingerprinting. Web trackers are able to stitch together little bits of information the users browser leaves behind into a cohesive whole, a fingerprint which follows them across their usage of the Web. Panopticlick is able to quantify the amount of information your browser leaks through the use of an information theoretical approach to privacy which determines how much information each individual metric (say, a user's list of fonts) reveals, and the relationship of these individual metrics to how much a browser reveals in general. Many of the misconceptions users have when using the site reflect an unclear picture about how their browser fingerprint is arrived at, and often leads users down a path that *decreases* their overall privacy in an attempt to increase it.

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Bill Budington

Bill Budington is a long-time activist and cryptography enthusiast, and a Senior Staff Technologist on EFF's Tech Projects team. Their research has been featured in the The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and The Guardian, and has been cited by the US Congress. Bill is the lead developer of Panopticlick, and he led HTTPS Everywhere from 2015-2018, and has contributed to projects like Let's Encrypt and SecureDrop.



Beyond "learning to code": How Tech Learning Collective merges IT training with emancipatory political action

: Sunday 16:35 - 17:20 EDT
: Neptune
: Education

What good is a pen if the paper it touches can refuse to show its ink? What good is your app when your API key is revoked? Through metaphor and with a unique apprenticeship-based pedagogy, Tech Learning Collective (TLC) is empowering users by doing exactly what code boot camps and corporate-funded "learn to code" programs don't: TLC tells students to ignore new Web frameworks and focus instead on the lowest layers of an IT stack like physical network and hardware storage devices. At TLC, infrastructure is the heart of a free software curriculum eschewing common rush-to-employment training paradigms in favor of Socratic classrooms where practicing Bash commands seamlessly meld with lectures about Gnostic influences on Ethernet, the relationship between Gregorian chants and bootloaders, and more. Come see why and how TLC's holistic approach to IT education is creating communities of activist sysadmins out of people who wouldn't otherwise have called themselves "techies."

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Tech Learning Collective

Tech Learning Collective is an apprenticeship-based technology school for radical organizers headquartered in New York City that provides a security-first IT infrastructure curriculum to otherwise underserved communities and organizations advancing social justice causes. We train politically self-motivated individuals in the arts of hypermedia, Information Technology, and radical political practice.

Founded and operated exclusively by radical queer and femme technologists, we offer unparalleled free, by-donation, and low-cost computer classes on topics ranging from fundamental computer literacy to the same offensive computer hacking techniques used by national intelligence agencies and military powers (cyber armies).



HPP committee

: Saturday 13:50 - 14:35 EDT
: Saturn
: LibrePlanet special sessions
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HPP Committee


Usable security for end-users: How Tor improves usability without compromising user privacy

: Saturday 14:45 - 15:30 EDT
: Jupiter
: Security

The Tor network, used by 2.5 million users every day, protects their privacy via “onion routing,” which directs Internet traffic – email, instant messages, online posts, Web form visits, and more – through a multilayered network that obfuscates who the user is, thus concealing their identity and location.

Because our design prioritizes privacy, our tools gather very little information about our users. Early in 2018, we began our User Research Program, where we incorporated user research as part of our outreach security trainings by doing interviews and collecting user feedback on the tools we taught participants during the training. So far, this program has reached an audience of over 800 people in countries like Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, India, Indonesia, Kenya and Uganda. The methods of conducting open user research and collecting usability feedback mentioned above have been informing design decisions in every stable Tor Browser release since 7.5 (and we’re up to 10.0.2!).

During this presentation we will share our human-centered design methodologies and the impact they had in releasing usable free software PET's.

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Antonela Debiasi

Antonela is a lead product designer, practicing ethical user research and free, human-centered, participatory design. She is interested in critical internet infrastructure, feminism as an intersectional practice, free software communities, privacy, and Russian avant-garde art. She holds a bachelor's degree in Communications Design from the National University in Rosario, Argentina, and a master's degree in Graphic and Media Design from the ISD in Napoli, Italy. She currently leads User Experience and Design at The Tor Project. Before joining a nonprofit for the first time, she designed products within for-profit industries including live betting, fintech, e-commerce, and AR/VR labs. She has been nomading all over the world between 2012-2020.



Adopting free software ideals

: Saturday 14:45 - 15:30 EDT
: Neptune
: Exploring Free Software concepts

Adopting free software ideals can be confusing and challenging for individuals, filled with cognitive dissonance and questioning of practicality. Am I a bad person if I use nonfree software? What example should I set as a free software activist or advocate? How does that relate to responsibilities of developers and distributors?

This is a talk about practical ethics and ideals. It is personal, drawing upon my experiences and evolution over the past fifteen years. It contains some awkward discussions that free software activists like to avoid, and hopes to guide those seeking to adopt more free software ideals, but fear they may not be able to meet such high standards. It's a talk about evolution and growth.

But complacency in the face of conflict can also dilute our ideals. So this is also a talk about balancing ideals in the context of one's own unique circumstances, while at the same time preserving a strong message about software freedom.

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Mike Gerwitz

Mike is a user freedom activist with a focus on user privacy and security; an assistant GNUisance for the GNU Project; and a member of the GNU Advisory Committee. He writes free software and uses exclusively free software in his day-to-day computing. Mike is a software engineer by profession, but a hacker at heart.



"Logiciel libre, société libre": Free software activism in France and Europe

: Saturday 12:55 - 13:40 EDT
: Jupiter
: Community

Founded in 1996, April is the main French advocacy association devoted to promoting and protecting free/libre software. Since 1996, it has been a major player in the democratization and the spread of free software and open standards to the general public, professionals and institutions in the French-speaking world. It also acts as a watchdog on digital freedoms, warning the public about the dangers of private interests keeping an exclusive stranglehold on information and knowledge.

Free software cannot develop fully without a benevolent political and legislative environment. That is where April plays a crucial role in France and Europe, along with allied organizations. Its actions, thanks to its volunteers and its staff, are precious for everyone who produces and/or uses free software. It is the organization's small contribution to the free software movement. Étienne Gonnu, an April staff member, will present on how it operates, the current French and European issues April is working on, and share future perspectives, strategies, successes, and challenges.

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Etienne Gonnu

Étienne Gonnu is the public affairs officer at April, the main French advocacy association devoted to promoting and protecting free/libre software.



Technopolice: One year of activism against surveillance technologies

: Saturday 10:10 - 10:55 EDT
: Jupiter
: Free software in Government

Technopolice is a French movement aiming to analyze and document the spread of surveillance technologies in our cities and lives, in order to defend civil rights and liberties. The movement was initiated by La Quadrature du Net in 2019, and was followed by other organizations and individuals in a decentralized way. In this talk we will go through:

  • one year of study and activism in the Technopolice movement;
  • how we collectively gather information on these ongoning projects;
  • how we legally, technically, ethically and socially analyze and debate on them;
  • how we try to make them visible and understandable to non-technical users;
  • how people, artists, activists, and citizens can resist;
  • how we can all spread the word, that this is not our future, and not the one that we have chosen;
  • how we value freedom, transparency, ethics;
  • how we value common goods and that our future is ours to build.
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Edlira Nano & Guinness

Edlira "Eda" Nano is a computer scientist, and is a board member of April, the French organization that defends and promotes free software, as well as a member of La Quadrature du Net, a French organization that defends digital liberties. You can learn more about Eda at https://eda.mutu.net.


Guinness Guinness is a member of La Quadrature du Net, Exodus Privacy, and Nos Onions.



Making dollars and sense of free software funding's future

: Sunday 14:45 - 15:30 EDT
: Neptune
: Community

Sustainably funding public goods is hard, just ask your local government. We know free software benefits everyone, whether or not users contributed to its development. How then can we reach the world of everyone working on software they love while making a livable wage? Let's discuss the current funding platforms, where they work, where they don't, and what does free software really need for a sustainable and successful future?

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Wm Salt Hale

Salt is a Seattle local studying Tech+Society at the University of Washington. He is also the Impresario of SeaGL and Community Director at Snowdrift.coop. Salt has been a daily GNU/Linux user since 1996 and spends his time thinking about software freedom communities and policy. He tries to be very approachable and will always be found wearing a kilt.



Regular expression workshop

:
: Workshops
: Workshop

Learn regular expressions (regex).
No prior knowledge of regex required.

Regex is a pattern matching language.
It uses sequences of characters to define a search pattern for text.

Many command line tools support regex.
Programming languages and database query languages also support regex.
Some web apps such as Elasticsearch also support regex.

This workshop introduces concepts, syntax, and language used in regex.
Labs give attendees hands-on opportunity to experiment with regex.

The workshop primarily uses extended regex on the command line.
It also touches on basic and Perl Compatible Regular Expressions (PCRE).

Common tools such as grep, sed and awk will provide conduits for learning regular expressions.

Attendees will learn:

  • regex concepts
  • symbols used by regex
  • how to search for text
  • how to capture and replace text
  • character classes
  • grouping
  • anchoring
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der hans

der.hans is a technologist, free software advocate, parent, and spouse. Hans is the chairman of the Phoenix GNU/Linux User Group (PLUG), Promotions and Outreach chair for SeaGL, BoF organizer for the Southern California Linux Expo (SCaLE) and founder of the Free Software Stammtisch. He presents regularly at large community-led conferences (LibrePlanet, SCaLE, SeaGL, LFNW, Tübix, OLF, TXLF) and many local groups.


He is currently a Customer Data Engineer at Object Rocket. Public statements are not representative of $dayjob.


Mastodon - https://floss.social/ @FLOX_advocate



Manufactura Independente: 10 years of designing in the libre

: Saturday 13:50 - 14:35 EDT
: Neptune
: Free Software in practice

In 2010, we started Manufactura Independente, a space to develop our design practice using free/libre software. At the time we had just finished our studies and learnt the hard way how proprietary software and file formats can own your work. While our first dip in the waters was tough -- installing a new OS, understanding new tools, rejecting proprietary options -- the path was clear: we were in control, we became users, contributors and owners of the tools we employed. With each project we set out to explore tools and principles, going beyond "open" towards a framing of copyleft and freedom in the graphic arts. 10 years went by and we want to underscore that anniversary by sharing our work, tools and stories of how we grew to love the GNU, and how free software ideals came to redefine our design practice, and are more relevant than ever today.

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Manufactura Independente

Manufactura Independente is a research studio for design and graphic communication focused on free software, free culture, and critical engagement with design tools. Born in 2010 and based in Porto, Portugal, it is the testing laboratory and playground of Ana Isabel Carvalho and Ricardo Lafuente, for their experiments in crossing design, free culture, media art, typography, data explorations, and hardware archaeology. They've been actively and critically exploring these connections through their work in Web development, print design, playful data visualization, custom software, and engagement with non-conventional tools, and they have held several type design workshops focused on alternative (and often quirky) creative workflows.



Openwifi project: The dawn of the free/libre WiFi chip

: Sunday 11:05 - 11:50 EDT
: Neptune
: Free Software in practice

In past decades, free software has played a key role towards the free and trusted Internet. In recent years, free software processor projects like RISC-V have pushed forward to construct free devices and computers. However, the radio connectivity of the device still relies on the black box silicons (WiFi, BLE, cellular chips). The Openwifi project (https://github.com/open-sdr/openwifi) aims to offer an free WiFi chip design that could act as the missing piece of the free software and hardware puzzle. As the initial step, the Openwifi project has implemented the 802.11a/g full-stack on an FPGA-based software defined radio (SDR) platform. The 802.11n feature is funded by NLnet and is under development. This presentation will give you the project overview and discuss the future of the project.

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Xianjun Jiao

Xianjun Jiao received a BA degree in Electrical Engineering from Nankai University in 2001, and a PhD in communication and information systems from Peking University in 2006. He worked in research departments and product teams in the leading industrial companies of wireless technology, such as Nokia Research Center, Microsoft, and Apple. In 2016, he joined IDLab, co-funded by Imec and Gent University, Belgium, working on SDR implementation of wireless networks. He is also an active free software SDR developer on LTE, BTLE, GPS, ADS-B and WiFi: you can see his work at https://github.com/JiaoXianjun


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Building equitable free software communities for all

: Saturday 15:40 - 16:25 EDT
: Saturn
: Community

Are you part of a free software community that’s building a tool you care about? Do you wish more people would participate, share code, and get excited about what you’re building? Have you ever tried to join a free software community that didn’t make you feel welcome? Let’s learn about what can make free software communities active, equitable, and resilient, and how we can encourage community collaboration, bug reporting, and contributions.

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Karen Johnson

Karen Johnson is a passionate, enthusiastic free software evangelist. Throughout her career, she has built creative, robust solutions for GNU/Linux systems. Currently, she is a devops engineer and people ops manager at CivicActions, where she supports team members with professional development, career growth, and generally being a welcoming person to talk to. She also works to infuse diversity, equity, and inclusion into all parts of her work, and is passionate about building equitable opportunities for all. When not working or limited by a pandemic, she can be found rock climbing, swing dancing, or reading lots of science fiction.



The challenges of change for values-centered nonprofits

: Saturday 16:35 - 17:20 EDT
: Saturn
: Social context

Organizational change is never easy. It can be particularly challenging in values-centered non-profits, where calls for healthy organizational change can be seen as criticism or a threat to the core values. This conversation between two long-time nonprofit leaders will dive into organizational change at two tech- and values-centered nonprofits, the Sunlight Foundation (where former leaders were accused of sexual harassment) and at the Wikimedia Foundation (where a sweeping strategic process has resulted in a broader vision that goes beyond free licensing to explicitly include equity). By seeing how one organization tried to rebuild after crisis, and another proactively reimagined its role in the broader free ecosystem, attendees should come away with ideas for how their own communities (small and large) can address the past and look towards the future.

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Luis Villa & Katherine Maher

Luis is the cofounder and General Counsel of Tidelift. Prior to founding Tidelift, Luis was Deputy General Counsel at the Wikimedia Foundation, handling a variety of issues, including free software and free data licensing. He also led the revision of the Mozilla Public License for the Mozilla Foundation. Luis has been an elected member of the boards of the GNOME Foundation and the Open Source Initiative. Before practicing law, Luis was an engineer and manager at Ximian, a Boston-based GNU/Linux desktop startup.


Katherine Maher is the CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization that operates Wikipedia and the Wikimedia projects. She is a longtime advocate for free and open societies, and has worked around the world leading the integration of technology and innovation in human rights, good governance, and international development.



"Public Money? Public Code!" A campaign framework to promote software freedom

: Sunday 11:05 - 11:50 EDT
: Saturn
: Free software in Government

Do you want to promote free software in public administrations? Then the campaign framework of "Public Money? Public Code!" might be the right choice for you. In this European Union campaign, more than 190 organizations and more than 29,000 individuals have come together to demand that publicly financed software should be made publicly available under free software licenses. Together, we contacted politicians and civil servants on all levels -- from the European Union and national governments to city mayors and the heads of public libraries -- about this demand. This effort started with important discussions about software freedom with decision makers, and has already resulted in specific policy changes.

In this talk, I will explain how the campaign framework can be used to push for the adoption of Free Software-friendly policies in your area.

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Matthias Kirschner

Matthias Kirschner is the president of the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE). In 1999, he started using GNU/Linux, and realized that software is deeply involved in all aspects of our lives, and this convinced him that technology has to empower society, not restrict it. While studying political and administrative science, he joined FSFE in 2004.

He helps other organizations, companies, and governments to understand how they can benefit from free software -- which gives everybody the rights to use, understand, adapt and share software -- and how those rights help to support freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and our right to privacy.



Bridging the digital divide in education with free software and hardware

: Saturday 10:10 - 10:55 EDT
: Neptune
: Social context

In the current digital era, knowledge systems are available and accessible in many forms digitally, making learning a easier process for almost everyone who has access to them. For instance, a primary school student is able to work on electronics, robotics, and programming. On the flipside, there are underprivileged students who do not have access to even a basic computer due to lack of IT infrastructure in their schools. This creates a digital divide.

To bridge the divide, we can use free software like GNU/Linux, free hardware designs, and freely licensed educational materials. The BalaSwecha project makes use of all these to develop a GNU/Linux distribution based on interactive learning principles for children studying in underprivileged and underfunded schools. The presentation will deal about details and execution of this community project.

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Sripath Roy Koganti

I am Sripath Roy Koganti, General Secretary of Swecha AP, which is part of the free software movement of India, based out of Andhra Pradesh. The name Swecha means "freedom" in the Telugu language. Swecha was founded in 2005, and is now a vibrant community of software users, students, academicians, and software professionals and developers. We work with a motto of “Technology for Society,” and use a free software development model.



Libre designers do exist (and survive)

: Sunday 15:40 - 16:25 EDT
: Neptune
: Free Software in practice

Libre designers do exist (and survive). Let's explore the pros and cons, experiences, job opportunities and more, from experiences gathered for over 15 years in the field.

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Maria Leandro

I’m a full-time designer and photographer, and I love to analyze how this interactive world works. I’m not a programmer, but that’s how I started. I have been in the field since 2002, and have been loving every minute of it. I love to learn and teach what I know about free software, and I enjoy meeting new friends from all around the world.



Free/libre solutions to address the shortage of ventilators

: Sunday 16:35 - 17:20 EDT
: Jupiter
: Free Software in practice

Over 100 teams attempted to create free/libre solutions to address the shortage of ventilators caused by the COVID-19 pandemic; we created a large spreadsheet evaluating all of them along many coordinates. Slowly, teams coalesced into a global community and began cooperating. There were many successes, failures, and learnings. The community had pioneered techniques that were re-used inconsistently to organize teams. The overall effect was mixed in terms of its success developing ventilators, but very successful in advancing the global free hardware community. We present this story from the point of view of a full-time active participant in many organizations.

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Robert Read & Marc Jones

Robert L. Read, PhD, has been a fan of free software since 1988. He has worked in director-level positions in the software industry, and was a Presidential Innovation Fellow in 2013. After leaving government service, he created Public Invention, a US 501c3 to create a movement to free hardware inventions. Since March, Public Invention has been working full time on the pandemic. In addition to a well-regarded analysis of free software ventilator efforts, Public Invention designed, manufactured, and gave away the VentMon, a ventilator tester. Public Invention has worked to create respiration data standards, and to forge a cooperating global community to create free-as-in-freedom ventilators.


Robert Read will be presenting with Marc Jones.



The defense of the GNOME Foundation

: Saturday 12:55 - 13:40 EDT
: Saturn
: Licensing

In August 2019, GNOME was notified that it was being sued in the state of California over a broad patent which allegedly covered Shotwell, a photo management application. The plaintiff? A prolific filer of patent suits, and a patent assertion entity. This was the first time that a free software project has been sued for patent infringement.

This talk is the story from the executive director of the GNOME Foundation, on how he responded and the strategies taken to not only defeat the suit, but to secure a groundbreaking agreement which means that this particular PAE will never be able to sue any free software project ever again.

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Neil McGovern

A long-term contributor to free software, Neil McGovern has held posts on the boards of Software in the Public Interest and the Open Rights Group, and served a term as the Debian Project Leader. Neil currently works as the Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation.



REUSE: Simple steps to declare your copyright and licenses

: Sunday 10:10 - 10:55 EDT
: Jupiter
: Licensing

Free software licensing can be tiresome. But setting the conditions for the use and reuse of your code is extremely important. To make developers' lives easier, there is the REUSE initiative. This presentation will explain simple yet powerful best practices for defining licenses and copyright holders.

In three easy steps, you can make sure that for all files are labelled clearly. No matter how complex you project is, REUSE keeps you covered. With the additional documents and tools, you can increase the time you actually can concentrate on coding.

Join the session to learn about the principles and see a live demo of how we make a project REUSE compliant.

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Max Mehl

Max Mehl is program manager at the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE), and coordinates initiatives in the areas of politics, public awareness, and licensing. He is also frequently to be found in the virtual server room of the FSFE. He sees free software as an important component to solve urgent technical and social problems. Every day, he is fascinated with how many advantages software freedom brings to different aspects of daily life -- from ethics to politics, and economy to security technology.



Here's how you can get all your day-to-day computing done with free software

: Sunday 13:50 - 14:35 EDT
: Saturn
: Free Software in practice

Here's how you can get all your day-to-day computing done with free software. Alice, 11, has given multiple talks at technical conferences and will go over more than 10 programs that will replace proprietary with free software.

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Alice Monsen

Alice, 11, has given multiple talks at technical conferences. She likes coding, art, and free software. She also enjoys listening to music and playing piano.



Free Software Data Fortress For Your Home

: 12:55 EDT -14:25 EDT
: Workshops
: Workshop

Your data is essential to your life, your agency, and your future. Come learn how to save, serve, and safely share your data at home with a smorgasbord of free software. I'll cover rapid setup and basic use of tools such as Traefik, Pi-Hole, Nextcloud, BackupPC, Wallabag, Jellyfin, Wordpress, and more. With these tools you can collaboratively edit documents in realtime online, stream music and video, and future-proof your digital assets.

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Adam Monsen

Adam (he/him) is a father, speaker, free software enthusiast and Seattle-area tech entrepreneur. You can find his personal homepage at adammonsen.com



User Respecting Software – free software development driven by users

: Sunday 10:10 - 10:55 EDT
: Saturn
: Exploring Free Software concepts

Why is it that some free software projects, although started at the same time as comparable propriety projects, are still playing catch-up in terms of number of users and desired features? Features comparisons as well as the network effect and how well known a piece of software is play into this, but what features do users find most important? We can’t make “better” software until we know what features users actually care about. This talk will explore prominent examples of free software projects and look at how free software can stay ahead of the curve.

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Lori Nagel

Lori Nagel has been active in the free software and free culture movements since 2005 when she joined the FSF. This will be her third year presenting at Libre Planet.



Lessons Framasoft has learned

: Saturday 11:05 - 11:50 EDT
: Saturn
: Community

Framasoft is a small, French nonprofit, made up of only thirty-five members and ten employees.

We've been promoting free/libre software and its culture for more than fifteen years. From a collaborative free software directory to a publishing house, from hosting more than thirty-five free/libre services (our Dégooglify the Internet campaign) to initiating a libre hosts collective (CHATONS), from PeerTube (free and federated alternative to YouTube) to Mobilizon (same, but for Facebook groups and events)...

We've tried a lot of things to help change the world, one byte at the time!

We want to share our experience outside of French boarders, so it can be studied and (hopefully) copied and adapted to other languages and cultures.

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Pouhiou Noénaute

Pouhiou has dabbled in acting, writing plays and novels under the CC-0 license, and vlogging, before he came to work for Framasoft. There, he helped the association in telling the world about the actions led by its members, and also helped to raise funds and shape projects. He is now one of the three co-directors of Framasoft.



Empower users by asking them for money

: Sunday 15:40 - 16:25 EDT
: Saturn
: Community

I've always been a free software programmer, a contractor to the rich and already powerful so they could use free software to its fullest. But, users, normal everyday users, are left out, and their needs are often different from business, universities and other large organizations who can afford to pay developers.

I wanted to develop Inkscape for users, and to do this I have started asking users to fund me directly. Four Inkscape developers currently use a personal funding platform to try and raise the money needed to make our activities more stable and user-focused. Come hear about my experiences setting up and operating in a federated and fragmented system and how we can move free software economics from business versus volunteers to a more equitable settlement for users and developers.

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Martin Owens

Free software programmer who has worked on the Ubuntu project, generics, space, embedded infrastructure, Web sites, and much more besides. Focused currently on Inkscape, and economics in the free software ecosystem.



Freeing networks where we need freedom most

: Saturday 11:05 - 11:50 EDT
: Neptune
: Exploring Free Software concepts

The struggle for the freedom of Internet is ever growing. Corporations, and their partner in crime, governments, come up with new clever ideas to restrict free flow of information. Overlords of the truth are trying to recover old control, which the Internet has eroded everywhere in favor of the people.
Networking and freedom of communication are meant to be great equalizers. That would be true if carriers of communication signals could come out of thin air. Like the land and means of production, our signals depend on existing infrastructure, and the lords who own them are an obstacle to the freedom of the people. Freifunk is a non-commercial, grassroots initiative to support free computer networks in the German region. We try to apply the same principles in Turkey, bringing power back to the people.

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Alper Atmaca & Özcan Oğuz

Alper was born into the 56K era, and made a potato clock when he was a child. He failed to keep time accurately with potatoes, and upgraded to solar power. When he failed again, he kept learning and became a part of the hacker community. He graduated from law school, become a lawyer, and applies his technological knowledge to law. Strict online privacy advocate, free software user/advocate, Hackerspace Istanbul (hs.ist) member, and very interested in anything encrypted.


Özcan Oğuz is the president of the Free Software Association (Özgür Yazılım Derneği) in Turkey. Ze started to use computers when ze was 2, in 1999. In 2007, with the Pardus project, ze first encountered free software philosophy and starting from then ze uses exclusively free software in zis devices. Ze graduated from Kadıköy Anadolu High School and Boğaziçi University. From 2016 to 2018, ze was working as publisher and journalist at Çırak mag and Abaküs Kitap. In 2017, ze founded Hackerspace Istanbul in Kadıköy, İstanbul. For three years, ze has been an instructor at Mustafa Akgül Free Software Camps, teaching GNU/Linux system administration.



How to free the imagination

: Sunday 10:10 - 10:55 EDT
: Neptune
: Free Software in practice

Many issues exist in the comic book industry: How to solve the problem of unauthorized sharing? How to protect authors from the asymmetrical relation between them and publishers? Where to find funding to live more fairly when doing art? How can authors be more independent with the tools they use? How to manage derivations, fan fiction and commercial reuse?
The author of Pepper&Carrot - a free/libre webcomic -- will propose new answers to these questions.

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David Revoy

My name is David REVOY, and I'm the author and founder of Pepper and Carrot. Pepper and Carrot is a free/libre webcomic painted and managed with 100% free software, and distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution license. The project is six years old, and has been a relatively good success, with over 1000 patrons, 68 contributors, 56 translations, 3,6 million readers per year, and commercial print versions from publishers in many countries.



A dispatch from the front lines of right to repair

: Sunday 13:50 - 14:35 EDT
: Neptune
: Social context

FUD fighting on the front lines of right to repair: As our homes, workplaces and public spaces fill with Internet-connected "smart" stuff, a digital right to repair is critical to protecting consumer rights, property rights and civil liberties. Despite that, electronics giants like Apple, Samsung, LG and General Electric have snuffed out scores of proposed state laws seeking to create such a right. How? By scaring legislators with tales of device hacking, cyber stalking and identity theft.

Creating a legal right to repair our stuff means short-circuiting these arguments and injecting a dose of facts into hearings and public debate. In this presentation, Paul Roberts, the founder of SecuRepairs, provides a dispatch from the front lines of right to repair and how his group of more than 200 IT and information security professionals is doing battle to set the record straight on cybersecurity and the right to repair.

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Paul Roberts

Paul Roberts is the founder of SecuRepairs, and the publisher and Editor in Chief of The Security Ledger, an independent security news Web site that explores the intersection of cyber security with the Internet of Things. Paul is a seasoned reporter, editor, and industry analyst, covering the information technology ("cyber") security space. His writing has appeared in publications including Forbes, The Christian Science Monitor, MIT Technology Review, The Economist Intelligence Unit, CIO Magazine, ZDNet, and Fortune Small Business. He has appeared on NPR’s Marketplace Tech Report, KPCC AirTalk, Fox News Tech Take, Al Jazeera, and The Oprah Show. You can find Paul online on Twitter at @paulfroberts, @securityledger, and @securepairs.



Does your GPU work with free graphics drivers?

: Saturday 14:45 - 15:30 EDT
: Saturn
: Free Software in practice

Does your GPU work with free graphics drivers? Nowadays, chances are good! What about with free firmware? In this talk, we'll look at the state of free software for graphics hardware: where we are, how far we've come, and where we're going. We'll talk about why some vendors support free software and tell the epic tales of reverse-engineering the hardware of those that don't. Will free software prevail?

The story of the free graphics movement, complete with protagonist hackers, proprietary antagonists, and plot twists on the road to freedom.

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Alyssa Rosenzweig

Alyssa is a free software graphics hacker leading Panfrost, the free software graphics driver for Arm Mali (Midgard and Bifrost) GPUs. Furthering free software has been her mission for years, and she is grateful for the opportunity to do so as a Collabora employee. Outside free software, she studies mathematics at the University of Toronto, and uses vim to write about small ponies.



SecureDrop Workstation: Handling unsafe documents safely

: Sunday 12:55 - 13:40 EDT
: Jupiter
: Security

SecureDrop is a whistleblowing platform originally created in 2012 for journalists to accept leaked documents safely from anonymous sources. It's used by dozens of news organizations including The Guardian, The Washington Post and The New York Times. This talk introduces the SecureDrop Workstation, the next-generation platform aimed at helping journalists communicate with sources in a high-security environment. Based on Qubes OS, the SecureDrop Workstation leverages Xen hypervisor isolation to manage sensitive source material safely, including viewing, archiving, and processing documents. The talk will review the results of the recent security audit focusing on the Workstation, and outline future directions for the project as it approaches general availability.

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Conor Schaefer

Conor Schaefer is the Chief Technology Officer at Freedom of the Press Foundation, overseeing development of SecureDrop and other engineering projects. He has strong opinions on privacy, free speech, and science fiction.



Remote education: My children's freedom and privacy at stake

: Sunday 12:55 - 13:40 EDT
: Saturn
: Education

During COVID-19 confinement, I saw how all teachers were choosing proprietary video conferencing programs over free software for the continuation of online lessons.
I had two options: do nothing about it and let proprietary video conferencing tools spread among my children and their classmates, or try to fight back against this injustice.
My paramount concern was for my own children. I knew in advance what it meant to start this battle. Moreover, this could affect my children’s feelings. They were not attending school and they were already facing a very complex challenge by being forced to stay at home. On the other hand, I was also afraid of having some kind of retaliation from their teachers against them because of my fight.
I didn’t want any of these things to happen. I needed to decide what to do, and evaluate if my commitment towards the free software movement was more important than my own children, or if I had to let it go this time.
I concluded that the answer was not either face a big fight or do nothing, I could do something in between; that at least would be better than doing nothing.

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Javier Sepulveda Sanchis

Javier Sepúlveda is the founder and executive director of VALENCIATECH, which runs GNU/Linux servers using free software exclusively. He was a professor of computer science for over ten years, and has worked as a programmer, systems administrator, and consultant. He donates his time to the GNU Project, the Free Software Foundation, and the Asociación de Usuarios de GNU/Linux de Valencia. He lives in Valencia (Spain) with his wife and two children.



Labor movements and the free software community

: Sunday 14:45 - 15:30 EDT
: Jupiter
: Free software in Government

The labor movement and free software are natural complements to one another. Both rely on (often decentralized) groups of workers that commit to a higher purpose in the pursuit of building something that will advance people on a larger scale. I’ll discuss the ways that values of free software and labor movements complement one another. I will outline the practical technology needs of labor organizations that could be met by free software. Finally I will talk about what attendees can do to support labor movements with free software by describing some promising organizations looking to bridge the gap.

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Amanda Sopkin

Amanda is a San Francisco transplant from Denver, Colorado, who loves mountains and beaches. She is a software engineering manager for Autodesk, in a division focused on connecting businesses in the pre-construction industry. Amanda has spoken on topics in software engineering at conferences like PyCon, SeaGL, and Codemotion. In her spare time, she attends hackathons as a coach for Major League Hacking, to help students have a great experience at the events they attend. She enjoys writing, speaking, and obsessively reading about sharks.



Unjust computing clamps down

: Sunday 15:40 - 16:25 EDT
: Jupiter
: Exploring Free Software concepts

RMS will elaborate on growing injustices in computing.
They are:

  • Locked-down operating systems
  • User-resticting app stores
  • Requiring nonfree client software, including Javascript (Javascript turns the web into something like an app store, but worse)
  • Online dis-services
  • Nvidia's Lubyanka: prisoners of the GPU
  • Proprietary non-interoperable tools as de-facto standards
  • The Internet of Malthings which will only talk with a mobile phone via an online dis-service
  • VR with nonfree platforms to run only nonfree applications
  • Vaccination "passports" could track people in daily life through restaurants, theaters, gyms, buses...

Together they reduce your computer to a platform for nonfree malware that will do you a disservice.

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Richard Stallman

Dr. Richard Stallman launched the free software movement in 1983 and started the development of the GNU operating system (see www.gnu.org) in 1984. GNU is free software: everyone has the freedom to copy it and redistribute it, with or without changes. The GNU/Linux system, basically the GNU operating system with Linux added, is used on tens of millions of computers today. Stallman has received the ACM Grace Hopper Award and the ACM Software and Systems Award, a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer Award, and the the Takeda Award for Social/Economic Betterment, as well as several doctorates honoris causa, and has been inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame.



Informal chatter to formal decisions: How-to

: Sunday 13:50 - 14:35 EDT
: Jupiter
: Community

So many repetitive conversations? No forward movement? Everyone getting along mostly, but not sure how to be decisive without clear hierarchy? What could legitimate authorization look like in a decentralized world anyway? This talk touches on specific steps anyone can take.

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Katheryn Sutter

Katheryn Sutter, PhD is a long time Debian user and advocate, a democratic-communications analyst, and a retired trainer of boards of directors of nonprofits, cooperatives, co-housing, activist groups, performers, and other community development projects. Since 2003, she has brought her deliberative considerations to free software communities.



Plom: Paperless Open Marking

: Sunday 11:05 - 11:50 EDT
: Jupiter
: Education

We will present Paperless Open Marking (Plom), a software system for giving tests on paper, but marking and returning them online. We (undergraduate students) worked on this software as a summer project.
Plom was developed because existing grading software was usually proprietary, too expensive, did not allow for the complexity of multiversioned tests required for crowded exam rooms, and might not respect local privacy laws. Plom respects privacy of student data: all data stays on your server, and markers do not see student names or IDs while they are marking.
Plom is GPLv3 licensed and is currently in use at the University of British Columbia. As an undergraduate student team, we made significant improvements to the functionality and correctness of Plom, and are excited to share our contributions with you.

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Victoria Schuster, Dryden Wiebe & Vala Vakilian

Presented with Dryden Wiebe & Vala Vakilian


Victoria Schuster is a fourth year engineering physics student at the University of British Columbia. She's passionate about the applications of libre designs to medical and educational spheres, and recently took on the position of manufacturing lead at Open Source Medical Supplies British Columbia, helping design and manufacture solutions based on free software principles for COVID-19. In her spare time, she's a member of UBC's Varsity Rowing Team, and Student Alumni Council.



The state of software in schools and what to do about it

: Saturday 11:05 - 11:50 EDT
: Jupiter
: Education

This session will briefly address why free software is important in education and provide examples of how proprietary software is rapidly deployed in schools.
This presentation aims to help people:
- rise up against this injustice, big and small,
- share time and resources which will be shared by and for participants,
- provide a safe discussion space to address issues in education,
- generate ideas for how to become active in their community to be included in an Action Guide,
- connect with others who are interested in helping the cause for free software in education spheres.

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Mariah Villarreal

I'm Mariah. I’m passionate about learning and software freedom. I've worked in formal and informal learning environments for close to ten years, while deepening my practice of using free software and restorative justice with students.



Software Heritage: The great library of source code

: Saturday 10:10 - 10:55 EDT
: Saturn
: Free Software in practice

Software Heritage collects, preserves, and shares software source code from major software development forges, free software distributions, package manager repositories, and more. As such, Software Heritage is the premier digital preservation initiative whose goal encompasses the long-term archival of free software commons for generations to come.
The Software Heritage archive is the largest publicly accessible archive of software source code, having collected 10 billion unique source code files and 2 billion unique commits from more than 140 million software projects.
This talk will provide an update about the Software Heritage project, focusing on increased archive coverage, integration with other initiatives, and way to practically use the archive, for both end users and developers.

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Stefano Zacchiroli

Stefano Zacchiroli is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Université de Paris, on leave at Inria. His research interests span formal methods, software preservation, and free software engineering. He is co-founder and current CTO of the Software Heritage project. He has been an official member of the Debian Project since 2001, where he was elected to serve as Debian Project Leader for 3 terms in a row over the period 2010-2013. He is a former Board Director of the Open Source Initiative (OSI), and recipient of the 2015 O'Reilly Open Source Award.