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LIBREPLANET 2012

Thanks for coming to LibrePlanet 2012 — We've worked hard to make this the very best LibrePlanet conference we've run. The venue this year is great, and I'm very pleased to personally welcome you.

I would love to hear your opinion of the conference, but there's time for that later. We have some amazing speakers lined up for this year's event, and while you won't be able to see all of them, I hope you'll give them all a warm welcome and listen to what they have to say.

To fully enjoy LibrePlanet you will need something to take notes, maybe a computer running free or even a notepad. You'll also need a smattering of genius, but the fact you're reading this is a sure indication that you are eminently qualified on that score.

If you're not speaking, but would like to say something, we have a lightning talk session open on Saturday exclusively for people who aren't speaking. You can sign up to give a talk at http://libreplanet.org/wiki/LibrePlanet2012 /LightningTalks.

In this booklet you'll find all the information you need at this event, including emergency contact information, where to eat and drink, the code of conduct we expect of everyone and of course, how to connect to the wireless network.

And on the back of this booklet, you'll find information on the GNU Press store and social events where you can hang out with your fellow conference attendees.

But there's time for all that later. Have fun!

Matt Lee Campaigns Manager Foundation

Important information

Getting to the conference — the conference is at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. We'll leave getting to Boston to you, but once you're here, take the MBTA's Red Line toward either Ashmont or Braintree (these are the only choices in the correct direction) and get off at JFK/U Mass station. From here,

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you can take a Shuttle Bus to the University campus. The shuttle bus leaves fairly regularly from a parking lot next to the station, and you should get off at the main campus center building, a large white building.

Eating — Every day there's breakfast, on us. If you'd like to kick in a few dollars, you'll find a jar to do so next to the breakfast. If you bought a food ticket as part of your registration, keep it safe as you will be required to give it up in exchange for lunch. If you lose it, you lose your lunch, so to speak.

If you chose to not get food from us, you'll find a grocery store back near the MBTA station. You can also bring your own food.

We will not have extra food available for sale, but you may also find food at the nearby JFK Library.

On Saturday, food will be served in the room where the majority of the talks take place. On Sunday, food will be served in the ballroom.

Drinking — It's really important to stay hydrated. All over the university are water fountains. Vending machines are all over the place as well, and we'll be providing soft drinks for people who bought lunch. In terms of social events and that kind of drinking, see the back page.

Code of conduct — We do not tolerate harassment of conference participants in any form. Offensive or graphic sexual language and imagery is not appropriate for any conference venue, including talks. Conference participants violating these rules may be sanctioned or expelled from the conference at the discretion of the conference organizers.

You can see the full anti-harrassment policy at http://libreplanet.org/wiki/Anti-harassment_policy.

Wireless — there's wireless internet all over the place at UMass — here are the connection details you need:

Wireless network: guest

A web page will appear when you try and access anything in your browser. Enter the following information.

Login: cc-guestuser Password: Boston13

Remember, this is not your network. Anything you do on the network will reflect on the FSF.

Help! — If you need any kind of assistance from the conference staff, please go to the information desk.

Emergency: In the event of any kind of medical emergency, please dial 911 first and inform the FSF, in person, at the information desk second.

Conference areas

Information desk + registration GNU Press Store Hacking Space Directory Sprint Talks

Information desk + registration

This will be the place to register. You will be given this booklet at registration. If you lose it, we have some extra copies.

More importantly: this is the place to go if you have any questions, feel unwell, have a problem, feel harassed or anything else.

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GNU Press Store

Donald and Jasimin will be here throughout the conference, with a range of books and other items you can buy. We've put a price list on the back cover of this leaflet, and you can pay with cash or credit card.

Hacking Space

This is a little more of a free-for-all — a quiet (possibly) space for you to work on projects alone, or with others. If you need to take a phone call when you're in here, please take it outside.

Directory Sprint

The FSF runs a project called the — http://directory.fsf.org — join us in the directory sprint room and add your favorite projects to the Directory.

Talks

The most important thing of all — the talks. We've put all the speakers and all of the information we have on their talks here.

Streaming

We'll have various streams going throughout the conference. See http://live.fsf.org for streams.

Saturday Conference

The Saturday conference has two tracks, space for hacking, and a directory sprint.

Track One: 2551 (room 2551 on the second floor) Track Two: 2540 (room 2540 on the second floor) Hacking space: 2550B Directory Sprint: 2545 Sunday Conference

The Sunday conference has one track, plus a space for hacking, and a directory sprint. At 4pm, all the rooms other than the main ballroom will be closed down for the Free Software Awards.

Speaking track: 3550A — Third floor ballroom, section A. Directory Sprint: 3545 — Third floor Hacking space: 3215

Saturday Schedule (first talk in 2551, second in 2540)

9am —Breakfast and Registration / GNU Press Store —Breakfast served in room U02-2551 only

10am —Welcome to the conference, John Sullivan, Matt Lee, Josh Gay (U02-2551 only) —Event in room U02-2551 only

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10:20am —FSF Campaigns Update, Matt Lee, Josh Gay (U02-2551 only) —Event in room U02-2551 only

11am —Trisquel 5.5 release, Rubén Rodríguez —TBA, Masayuki Hatta

11:35am —Break —Break

11:45am —GNU Telephony, David Sugar —Running events that attract and retain newcomers, Asheesh Laroia

12:30pm —Lunch —Keysigning

1:25pm —GNU Savannah, Michael J. Flickinger —Digital Justice: How Technology and Free Software Can Build Communities and Help Close the Digital Divide, Joel Izlar

1:55pm —Why Cars need Free Software, Alison Chaiken —Lightning Talks

2:30pm —The FSF GPL compliance Lab, Brett Smith —

3:10pm —Libre Graphics magazine: Go, go F/LOSS designers!, ginger coons —Lightning Talks

3:50pm —Break —Lightning Talks

4:00pm —A View from the Server Room, Ward Vandewege —Lightning Talks

4:30pm —Community Organizing for Free Software Activists, Deb Nicholson —Lightning Talks

5:10pm —Decentralized Social Web, Evan Prodromou (U02-2551 only) —Event in room U02-2551 only

Sunday Schedule

9am —Breakfast and Registration / GNU Press Store

10am —Welcome to Day Two — John Sullivan, Matt Lee, Josh Gay

10:10 —Free Software's Future Amidst the Commercial Open Source Wars: How to Turn the Patent Disaster and Compliance Issues to Our Advantage,

11:00 —, Mike Linksvayer + Chris Webber

11:40 —Break

11:50 —How changed my life, Yukihiro 'matz' Matsumoto

12:30 —Lunch and Keysigning

1:20 —Preserving user freedoms in the 21st century, Matthew Garrett

2:20 —GNOME3 and Accessibility,

3:10 —GPL panel: Richard Fontana, Bradley M. Kuhn, Brett Smith

3:55 —Free Software Accessibility, Jonathan Nadeau

4:35 —Break

4:45 —The importance of GPLv3, Jeremy Allison

5:20 —, plus FSF annual awards and GNU Press Auction

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Talks in detail

Saturday

Welcome to the conference (U02-2551)

John Sullivan Matt Lee Josh Gay

Join FSF executive director John Sullivan, and campaigns managers Matt Lee and Josh Gay in this introduction to LibrePlanet 2012, including essential information for the conference, last minute notices, surprise guests and more.

John started working with GNU Press and the in 2003 and then became the FSF's first campaigns manager, working on outreach efforts like , BadVista, and PlayOgg. In 2011, John became the executive director after four years as manager of operations.

His background is mainly in the humanities, with an MFA in Writing and Poetics and a BA in Philosophy, but he has been spending too much time with computers and online communities since the days of the Commodore 64. He's become a dedicated GNU Emacs user after first trying it around 1996, and contributes code to several of its extensions.

Prior to the FSF, John worked as a college debate team instructor for both Harvard and Michigan State University.

FSF Campaigns Update (U02-2551)

Matt Lee Josh Gay

Matt Lee and Josh Gay are the two campaigns managers at the Free Software Foundation.

What is a campaigns manager? A campaigns manager is responsible for our ongoing campaigns, such as Defective by Design and PlayOgg. They are also responsible for keeping our websites up-to-date, as well as the branding, public relations, and marketing of new actions, new GNU Press products, LibrePlanet and more.

Matt Lee is our campaigns manager. He was previously a GNU webmaster, with a two-year position as the GNU chief webmaster.

Away from the FSF, Matt makes noises with his band, wrote the book "Exploring Freedom" and is the founder of Libre.fm, and GNU social.

Josh Gay is our newest campaigns manager. He comes back to the FSF from working on free textbooks in California.

He is a programmer, activist, and community organizer whose interests revolve around technology, government, education, and computer user-freedom.

Trisquel 5.5 release (U02-2551)

Rubén Rodríguez

Rubén is a 29 year old computer engineer from Spain, founder and main developer of the Trisquel GNU/ project. He also started two small IT companies which are still working to offer services towards free software, and he currently works as CTO for Activity Central, helping educational free software deployments in development countries.

TBA (U03-3540)

Masayuki Hatta

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Masayuki Hatta (八田真行) is an assistant professor of Economics at the Facaulty of Economics, Surugadai University in Saitama, Japan. Trained as an economist/organizational theorist, Hatta writes and talks extensively about the so-called intellectual property issues and software licensing in particular. He is also a journeyman hacker (a GNU and developer), an avid supporter of the free software cause and a vocal advocate for hacktivism and the freedom of the internet in general.

GNU Telephony (U02-2551)

David Sugar

David Sugar is an active maintainer for a number of packages that are part of the GNU Project and works on free software for telecommunications.

Running events that attract and retain newcomers (U03-3540)

Asheesh Laroia

Asheesh loves growing camaraderie among geeks. In the past, he has chaired the Johns Hopkins Association for Computing Machinery and taught Python classes through community spaces in San Francisco and Boston. He realizes that most of the work that makes collaborative projects successful is hidden beneath the surface. Professionally, he has engineered software at Creative Commons and the Participatory Culture Foundation. Today, he works as project lead for OpenHatch, a non-profit making collaborative code communities more welcoming.

GNU Savannah (U02-2551)

Michael J. Flickinger

Michael J. Flickinger has been involved with GNU Savannah since 2004, and presently acts as Savannah's maintainer. Michael discovered GNU/Linux over twelve years ago and hasn't ever looked back since. Michael currently resides in Indiana, Pennsylvania.

Digital Justice: How Technology and Free Software Can Build Communities and Help Close the Digital Divide (U03-3540)

Joel Izlar

Joel Izlar is a graduate student at the University of Georgia's School of Social Work focusing on community empowerment, program development and non-profit management. His interests include radical social work, poverty reduction, social, economic and digital justice, community organizing, technology, art and free culture. Izlar is particularly interested in how free frameworks and technology can be used to empower communities and promote radical social change.

Izlar is currently sitting board president of Free IT Athens, an Athens, Georgia based non-profit organization that seeks to provide low-cost computer equipment and services to those in need. Izlar also resides on the Whatever It Takes initiative's technology team, an intitative that aims to ensure every child in Athens-Clarke county Georgia obtains a college education. Izlar has spoken on the topics of digital justice, technology and community change, technology and community organizing, and technology and domestic violence prevention.

Why Cars need Free Software (U02-2551)

Alison Chaiken

My interest is in Event Data Recorders in cars and how they (and other ) will affect the privacy of drivers and the safety of vehicles.

I was extremely impressed by the FSF's identifying cars as an area of concern in the Holiday Gift Buying Guide, as few in our community are paying attention to vehicles yet.

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The FSF GPL compliance Lab (U02-2551)

Brett Smith

Brett works in the Licensing Compliance Lab as our compliance engineer and licensing guru. He joined the FSF in August 2006 and handled the GPLv3 process. He was introduced to free software in high school and immediately became an advocate for the idea, writing papers and giving speeches on the subject.

Libre Graphics magazine: Go, go F/LOSS designers! (U02-2551)

ginger coons ginger "all-lower-case" coons is a designer, artist, sometimes-academic and all-round trouble maker. She is a member of the Libre Graphics magazine editorial team, serving as copy editor, fill writer and general editorial grunt. In addition to her activities with Libre Graphics Magazine, she gives talks and workshops introducing designers and artists. In addition to all of the above, she is a doctoral student in the Faculty of Information at the University of . ginger has spoken (notably) at Libre Graphics Meeting 2009 in , Libre Graphics Meeting 2010 in , Make Art 2010 in Poitiers and FOSDEM 2011 in Brussels. She has lectured to students about the merits of incorporating F/LOSS into design workflows and has spoken about her own art and design work at various galleries and artist-run centres.

A View from the Server Room (U02-2551)

Ward Vandewege

Ward discovered GNU/Linux in 1995 and never looked back. He likes to do both system administration and programming work and doesn't mind wielding the occasional soldering iron. He became Chief Technology Officer at the Free Software Foundation in September 2011, and worked previously as a system administrator since 2005, and was a volunteer before that.

Community Organizing for Free Software Activists (U02-2551)

Deb Nicholson

Deb Nicholson works at the intersection of technology and social justice. She has over fifteen years of non-profit management experience and got involved in the about six years ago. She currently splits her time between the Open Invention Network, MediaGoblin and Open Hatch. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts where she is slowly pursuing a graduate degree in Information Technology at .

Decentralized Social Web (U02-2551 only)

Evan Prodromou

Evan Prodromou is the founder of StatusNet Inc and the creator of the StatusNet software. His 20 years of software development experience began at Intel, then at in the early 90s, which he left in 1996 to concentrate on the growing Web.

In 2003 Prodromou founded Wikitravel.org, a free, up-to-date world-wide travel guide with a Creative Commons ShareAlike license. Prodromou created the StatusNet software in 2008 and launched the community Identi.ca in July of that year.

Sunday

Welcome to Day Two

John Sullivan

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Matt Lee Josh Gay

Free Software's Future Amidst the Commercial Open Source Wars: How to Turn the Patent Disaster and Compliance Issues to Our Advantage

Eben Moglen

Professor of Law and Legal History at Law School. Professor Moglen has represented many of the world's leading free software developers. Professor Moglen earned his PhD in History and law degree at during what he sometimes calls his “long, dark period” in New Haven. After law school he clerked for Judge Edward Weinfeld of the United States District Court in New York City and for Justice Thurgood Marshall of the United States Supreme Court. He has taught at since 1987 and has held visiting appointments at Harvard University, Tel Aviv University and the .

In 2003 he was given the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer Award for efforts on behalf of freedom in the electronic society. Professor Moglen is admitted to practice in the State of New York and before the United States Supreme Court.

Creative Commons

Mike Linksvayer Chris Webber

Creative Commons is a non-profit devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has released several licenses, and these licenses allow creators to communicate which rights they reserve, and which rights they waive for the benefit of recipients or other creators.

Chris Webber is also the principal developer of the GNU MediaGoblin project that is working to build software to enable people to share their drawings, photos and videos with others in freedom.

Defending Freedom in the 21st Century

Matthew Garrett

A former fruitfly biologist, Matthew now spends his time making sure that the kernel Linux works on modern hardware, and is involved with the UEFI and ACPI standards bodies so you don't have to be. He's also a strong believer that vendors who ship GPLed code should actually conform to the license requirements, and is willing to sit outside their offices until they do.

GNOME 3 and Accessibility

Karen Sandler

Karen M. Sandler is the Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation. Prior to joining GNOME, she was General Counsel of the Software Freedom Law Center. Karen continues to do pro bono legal work with SFLC and serves as an officer of both the Software Freedom Conservancy and SFLC.

Before joining SFLC, she worked as an associate in the corporate departments of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP in New York and Clifford Chance in New York and . Karen received her law degree from Columbia Law School in 2000, where she was a James Kent Scholar and co-founder of the Columbia Science and Technology Law Review. Karen received her bachelor’s degree in engineering from The Cooper Union.

GPL panel

Richard Fontana Bradley M. Kuhn

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Brett Smith

A panel discussion about the GNU General Public License.

Richard Fontana is a lawyer at , responsible for advising developers, managers and fellow lawyers about free software licensing, copyright and patent issues, educating non-developers about free software culture, and promoting open standards and legal reform.

Before joining Red Hat, Fontana was Counsel at the Software Freedom Law Center, where he principally worked on drafting GPL version 3 for the Free Software Foundation.

Bradley M. Kuhn is President and Executive Director of the Software Freedom Conservancy and on the Board of Directors of the Free Software Foundation (FSF). Kuhn began his work in the Free, Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) Movement as a volunteer in 1992, when he became an early adopter of the GNU/Linux , and began contributing to various FLOSS projects.

He worked during the 1990s as a system administrator and software developer for various companies, and taught AP Computer Science at Walnut Hills High School in Cincinnati. Kuhn's non-profit career began in 2000, when he was hired by the FSF. As FSF's Executive Director from 2001-2005, Kuhn led FSF's GPL enforcement, launched its Associate Member program, and invented the Affero GPL. From 2005-2010, Kuhn worked as the Policy Analyst and Technology Director of the Software Freedom Law Center. Kuhn holds a summa cum laude B.S. in Computer Science from Loyola University in Maryland, and an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Cincinnati. His Master's thesis discussed methods for dynamic interoperability of FLOSS languages.

Free Software Accessibility

Jonathan Nadeau

Jonathan is a father, husband and a blind GNU/Linux user. Being a advocate of Free software and accessibility, he worked with Ruben Rodriguez from Trisquel during his internship at the FSF. He brought awareness of accessibility to Ruben and they worked together to make sure that Trisquel was accessible to blind and low vision users.

The importance of GPLv3

Jeremy Allison

Jeremy Allison is one of the lead developers on the Samba Team, a group of programmers developing a Free Software Windows compatible file and print server product for UNIX systems. Developed over the Internet in a distributed manner similar to the GNU/Linux system, Samba is used by all Linux distributions as well as many thousands of corporations and products worldwide. Jeremy handles the co-ordination of Samba development efforts and acts as a corporate liaison to companies using the Samba code commercially.

Jeremy is a member of the Board of Directors of the Software Freedom Conservancy, a not-for-profit organization that helps promote, improve, develop, and defend Free, Libre, and Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects.

He works for Google, Inc. who fund him to work on improving Samba and solving the problems of Windows and GNU/Linux interoperability.

Richard Stallman, plus FSF annual awards and GNU Press Auction

Richard Stallman

Richard is a software developer and software freedom activist. In 1983 he announced the project to develop the GNU operating system, a Unix-like operating system meant to be entirely free software, and has been the project's leader ever since. With that announcement Richard also launched the Free Software Movement. In October 1985 he started the Free Software Foundation.

Since the mid-1990s, Richard has spent most of his time in political advocacy for free software, and spreading the ethical

9 LIBREPLANET 2012 ideas of the movement, as well as campaigning against both software patents and dangerous extension of copyright laws. Before that, Richard developed a number of widely used software components of GNU, including the original Emacs, the GNU Compiler Collection, the GNU symbolic debugger (gdb), GNU Emacs, and various other programs for the GNU operating system.

Richard pioneered the concept of copyleft, and is the main author of the GNU General Public License, the most widely used free .

Richard graduated from Harvard in 1974 with a BA in physics. During his college years, he also worked as a staff hacker at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, learning operating system development by doing it. He wrote the first extensible Emacs text editor there in 1975. He also developed the AI technique of dependency-directed backtracking, also known as truth maintenance. In January 1984 he resigned from MIT to start the GNU project.

GNU Press Price List and social events

These are the only products we'll be selling at the event, prices listed are for cash payments. Electronic payments will be done via the GNU Press Store.

Debugging with GDB — $40 Emacs Manual V 23.3 — $45 Free as in Freedom — $20 Free Software Free Society — $20 Baby GNU — $25 All t-shirts — $20 All buttons — $1 GNU/Linux inside foil stickers — $3 ($5 for 2)

You can pay with cash or card at the event.

Social events are not run by the FSF unless otherwise stated.

Saturday, March 24th: FOO272, FooBar 3.0 -- JJ Foley's, Kingston Street, Downtown Crossing -- 21+ only -- 7pm - late Sunday, March 25th: Grendel's Den (Harvard Square, Cambridge -- Red Line MBTA: Harvard) dinner -- 7pm - late Monday, March 26th: The FSF is having a lunch event for attendees.

See http://libreplanet.org/wiki/LibrePlanet2012/SocialEvents for any updates to this.

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