freenode #live – Bristol 2018
freenode #live is a “community-focused live event designed to build and strengthen relationships between Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) developers and users”. The 2018 event was held in Bristol, United Kingdom at We the curious with roughly 100-200 people attending (from my guesswork).
The event essentially had a single track of talks. The old IMAX theatre above the Aquarium was used as an auditorium with various stalls for organizations set up outside. These stalls included KDE, Kiwi IRC, Private internet access and more.
Most of the talks were recorded and can be found on this YouTube playlist. Now for some of my main takeaways or points of note, most of which are IRC related, which might make sense as the conferences is called freenode #live…
Kiwi IRC
The FOSS version of irccloud might finally be here!!! I’m really excited about this project as I have been an irccloud user for some years now but always feel a little bit guilty knowing money is being spent on it. I haven’t tried Kiwi IRC out it sounds great. Future features that I’m excited about that are apparently on the horizon include persistent connections to networks (similar to irccloud premium) and a native mobile app. Current features include things such as JS scripting, video chat initiations. I’m sure I’ll be writing another post about this once I give it a go myself.
CGI:IRC
There was a talk by David Leadbeater, the main author of CGI:IRC, about how the CGI:IRC came into the world. The original version just 2 frames, one keeping a constant connection open to the server for updates from the server with the other containing the input box and submit button to post messages the other way.
Other talking points
- “Even if you run your own mail server, Google has your email anyway”. “Mail is now a very centralized communication format, even though there is a standard with it.” – John Sullivan – How can free communication tools win?
- In relation to GDPR and cookie acceptance banners, “Saying you use cookies on a website is like saying you use molecules” – Doc Searls and Simon Phipps – In Conversation
- Minetest is “an open source voxel game engine” that looks just like minecraft which looks pretty good.
Conference review
The conference generally worked well.
There are a few technical issues with laptops and presentations toward the beginning where a VGA adapter had to be borrowed from the crowd but other than that technically sound.
It was a shame that attendees name badges only contained their name and no other information about themselves.
I felt like what I imagine a super small FOSDEM would be like.
Maybe next year I should give a talk.