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Moglen to speak on “Freedom in the Cloud” this Friday

February 1, 2010 in conferences by Mike Linksvayer | No comments

Internet Society of New York has a not to be missed event in a few days:

Eben Moglen, Professor of Law and Legal History at Columbia University, and founder, Director-Counsel and Chairman of the Software Freedom Law Center, will speak about “Freedom in the Cloud: Software Freedom, Privacy and Security for Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing” on Friday, February 5, 2010, 7-9 pm. This event will be webcast live.

HT Michael Mandiberg.

Evan Prodromou's Libre Planet keynote on engineering for free network services

March 31, 2009 in conferences, podcast by Mike Linksvayer | No comments

Another podcast lite — audio recording of Evan Prodromou’s Libre Planet keynote on engineering for free network services based on his years of experience developing free software and in particular the free network service identi.ca, the laconica software that service runs, and the OpenMicroBlogging federation protocol the software implements. Announced after the conference, see Evan’s post on status.net for where he’s taking the service. Very exciting stuff!

To whet your appetite for the podcast I’ll highlight probably the two least obvious or most controversial points Evan made:

  • Smart data reduces the need for smart code, thus supports user autonomy. Put another way (from Evan microblogging a later conference rather than this talk, but it fits), metadata democratizes data. On that note watch for more exciting stuff being done with RDFa all the time.
  • Build free network services in PHP/MySQL. This is painful for many to hear, but if you want your code to be deployed by people on their own servers (or their own $5/month or less shared hosting account — the key being they control the code running the application in either case), PHP and MySQL are far easier for users to deal with than cooler stacks that require installing additional software in the typical case.

Listen and see notes and slides for more.

Mako Hill's Libre Planet keynote on free network services

March 30, 2009 in conferences, podcast by Mike Linksvayer | 1 comment

Benjamin Mako Hill gave a keynote at Libre Planet outlining progress on defining free network services since last year’s FSF member meeting, primarily the launch of Autonomo.us’ Franklin Street Statement, and an update on discussions within the FSF on network services.

See slides and notes from the talk and listen to an audio recording.

Continuing in the tradition of Bradley Kuhn posting a conference keynote in the podcast category of this blog, I’ll post this and perhaps others from Libre Planet one at a time as podcasts (or podcast lites — we’ve had only two fully produced Autonomo.us podcast episodes so far).

This recording is in format. Hopefully your podcatcher knows how to deal with that. [Update: works just fine in .]

LibrePlanet Unconference Session Ideas

March 20, 2009 in conferences by Mike Linksvayer | 1 comment

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!):

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.

LibrePlanet Conference March 21-22

February 20, 2009 in conferences by Benjamin Mako Hill | 1 comment

Autonomo.us got started last year the day after the FSF members meeting with the first meeting of the Autonomo.us  team. It was at that meeting that we drafted the first version what would later become the Franklin Street Statement.

We’ve come a long way and this year and we’re helping to celebrate and to plan our future by joining with the FSF to help organize a chunk of the two-day LibrePlanet conference. Unsurprisingly, our chunk will focus on issues around software freedom and network services. A good chunk of the folks that have blogged here are already confirmed their attendance.

Saturday March 21 will be more of a normal conference form and will feature a series of talks by experts on some of the key issues facing free software. Perhaps more exciting though is that on Sunday March 22 there will be an open space style conference with three tracks. One of these tracks is being organized by Autonomo.us members and will be focused on freedom for network services. We’ll raise and tackle the important questions. We’ll try to make connections, think strategically and technically, and plan next steps.

If you are interested in these issues and there is any way you can get to Boston for the conference, please consider making the trip out. There are loads of good people coming. It looks like it will be a blast and may very well be this year’s most important single event for people interested in issues of autonomy and network services.

There’s information on travel, location, hotels, and more on this web page and on this wiki page (login is required to RSVP). And please, spread the word!