LibrePlanet Unconference Session Ideas

As announced here last month, the Free Software Foundation’s annual conference, Libre Planet, includes a free network services theme.

Tomorrow (Saturday) there will be keynotes by Mako Hill and Evan Prodromou of this (Autonomo.us) group on free network services.

Sunday there will be an unconference, hopefully with lots of thought dedicated to free network services sessions. Here are a few session ideas that I’ve (except for the personal servers one, by Wes Felter) added to the LibrePlanet wiki, some keying off ideas discussed on the first Autonomo.us podcast (six months ago!):

• Personal Servers: On combining the best features of the PC and the cloud in the personal server: a (virtual) server for each person that lives in a data center yet is under total control of its user.
• Making existing FLOSS WebApps Free Network Services By Default: Several easy to difficult ideas for making web applications that are free software be free network services out-of-the-box.

And a bit more on the activism side (the other unconference tracks are activism and high priority projects):

• Free Network Services and Internet Policy: Free software and specifically free network services could have a role in mitigating or preventing some of the bad scenarios (and in abetting good outcomes) discussed in net policy circles, but those policy debates seem to ignore or discount free software. Should we engage policy people? Is there any hope of directing any of their punditry to free software advocacy?
• Freedom Pact: Idea to get people to pledge to take Free-as-in-Freedom positive actions by/on a certain date, with a big menu of actions (including directly autonomo.us relevant ones) so that everyone can participate.

Even if you can’t make it to LibrePlanet, please edit the unconference session proposals above or add your own ideas that you’d like to have LibrePlanet participants (or future web readers) work on.