Conferences – Máirín Duffy

User Experience (UX) + Free Software = ❤

Today I gave a talk at DevConf.cz, which I previously gave as a keynote this past November at SeaGL, about UX and Free Software using the ChRIS project as an example. This is a blog-formatted version of that talk, although you can view a video of it here from SeaGL if you’d rather a video. Let’s talk about a topic that is increasingly critical as time goes on, that is really important for those of us who work on free software and care really deeply about making a positive impact in the world. Let’s talk about user experience (UX) and free software, using the ChRIS Project as a case study. What is the ChRIS Project? The ChRIS project is an open source, free software platform developed at Boston Children’s Hospital in partnership with other organizations – Red Hat (my employer,) Boston University, the Massachusetts Open Cloud, and others. The overarching goal of the ChRIS project is to make all of the amazing free software in the medical space more accessible and usable to researchers and practitioners in the field. This is just a quick peek under the hood – because I’m saying ChRIS is a “platform,” but it can be …

Fedora Flock Recap: Day 3

mairin August 11, 2013 Conferences / Fedora / Flock3 Comments

Here’s the set of sessions from today that had either video and/or transcripts available! The missing vids from Saturday will take some time to recover because the YouTube video editor won’t allow editing of videos that are 4 hours long, apparently. :-/ All right, then. Here’s the recap! Sunday Making Free Fonts Full Time Cantarell is the default UI font in GNOME3. The founder of the project, Dave Crossland, details his work during the last few years to cultivate a free culture of typography, and reveals a new model of crowdfunding that he hopes will enable more people to work on their projects full time. Speaker: Dave Crossland Slides: Not available 🙁 Transcript: Transcript by nirik Video: Not available yet 🙁 Changing the Default Updates Model Currently, the Fedora updates model is a “fire hose” model. Updates are always coming to the user, for all installed packages, in a never-ending stream. I would like to discuss changing the default updates model to a monthly bundled update push. Speaker: Tom Callaway Slides: Slides link Transcript: Transcript by nirik Video: Not available yet 🙁 Gaming on Fedora Gaming on Fedora linux, includes Steam, Wine, Emulated, and of course, Native games. Welcome to …

Fedora Flock Recap: Day 2

mairin August 11, 2013 Conferences / Fedora / Flock6 Comments

Ed. Note: The Virtio talk had the wrong description and the Game Art talk had inadvertently gotten removed from the post. I’ve fixed these things up again – thanks to gurdonark for pointing these mistakes out! Here’s today’s Flock recap! Oh, but wait! I have some things to tell you! Missing Friday Videos – Miracle Appearance! One of the saved videos from Friday was a ~2 hour long stream that had 2 talks in it and was inaccessible yesterday. Today, I was able to edit it down into the two talks. Also, another Friday talk video mysteriously appeared. So… we’ll do a “Friday: The Missing Videos” recap at the end of this post. (And there will probably be a “Saturday: the missing videos” recap tomorrow, because I see that YouTube is still contemplating some of the longer recordings from today, from ECTR109.) Okay… Now Where Are the Auditorium Videos plz? Well… they are on an sdcard in the camera. So they aren’t up online yet. As I understand it, some may have not recorded properly (the battery died at least once, during Robyn’s keynote, and the stream was down this morning for the beginning of the badges talk before Spot …

Fedora Flock Recap: Day 1

mairin August 10, 2013 Conferences / Fedora / Flock5 Comments

The fact that I’m able to post a recap of the first day of Flock is really due to the excellent organization of the many staff and volunteers who are doing an amazing job making Flock accessible to remotees. I’m not actually in South Carolina, folks! Okay, so here’s a quick rundown of the day 1 talks that have transcripts and / or video recordings: The Highly Esteemed Fedora Project Leader’s World-Famous State of Fedora Address Keynote from the Fedora Project Lead. Robyn gave a keynote talk about Fedora and love. The video camera battery died maybe 10 minutes in, so I almost missed it, but nirik saved the day with his mobile phone! 🙂 Speaker: Robyn Bergeron Slides: Slides link Transcript: Transcript (by mizmo) Video: Not available yet, but I think it will be at some future point. Volunteer in charge was Spot. Fedmsg – Fedora Infrastructure’s Realtime Messaging System In this presentation, I’ll give an overview of fedmsg, what it is, how it works, and why some design decisions were made the way they were. The second half of the presentation will cover new projects integrating with fedmsg. Speaker: Ralph Bean Slides: Slides link Transcript: Transcript (by ianweller) …

Flock for Remote Attendees Part 2: IRC & Call for Help!

mairin August 6, 2013 Conferences / Fedora / FlockLeave a comment

Flock IRC Channels Here’s the lineup of IRC channels we created on irc.freenode.net for remote attendees to follow along. You may want to configure them in your IRC client now to make your remote attendance easier. I’ve linked each channel name up to the freenode web client just in case it’s helpful. If you’re using xchat / hexchat and just want to copy/paste the full list in a format xchat will take to allow you to auto-join, here you go: #fedora-flock,#fedora-flock-auditorium,#fedora-flock-ectr101,#fedora-flock-ectr103,#fedora-flock-ectr107,#fedora-flock-ectr109,#fedora-flock-ectr112,#fedora-flock-ectr114,#fedora-flock-ectr115,#fedora-flock-ectr120,#fedora-flock-ectr212 Remember, the #fedora-flock channel is for general discussion / updates / questions about the Flock conference. The room-specific channels are for live transcription (if available) of the talks in the rooms as well as discussion about the talk as it proceeds. All flock channels: Click on this link to join all of the Flock conference channels in the Freenode webchat client.

Flock for Remote Attendees Part 2: IRC & Call for Help!

mairin August 6, 2013 Conferences / Fedora / Flock15 Comments

Flock For Remote Attendees

mairin August 3, 2013 Conferences / Fedora / Flock3 Comments

I won’t be attending Flock in-person, but since there’s a strong possibility there will be video streams of talks available, I intend to attend virtually! You may remember at FUDCon Lawrence, I listened to the streams that were available (*huge* thanks to the folks who made that happen, including Ryan Lerch and Ryan Rix for using their mobile phones to provide additional streaming coverage for me!) During these streams I transcribed the talks live in IRC and even did a blog post on one of the more popular talks. 🙂 Since this whole transcription thing was rather last-minute and haphazard, I was hoping to do it in a more organized fashion this go-around. I need your help, though, whether or not you’ll be attending Flock. If you’re *not* attending Flock Tell me which talks you’d like transcribed! Take a gander at the Flock schedule and let me know (comments on this post is fine, or you can email me) which talks you’d like to virtually attend. Please send your requests by the end up Wednesday, August 7. I will tally up the votes and come up with a prioritized list of talks to transcribe. Help transcribe! If you are a …

Shut Up & Draw: A Non-Artist Way to Think Visually (SXSW)

mairin March 19, 2012 Conferences / SXSW 2012Leave a comment

Hello there! I was at SXSW (South By Southwest) 2012 last week, going to the interactive conference. Anyway, I tend to take copious notes when I go to talks. I thought they might be useful to a wider audience, so here you go. You can see other SXSW 2012 posts that I’ve made as well. Panelists: Sunni Brown (@sunnibrown) Jessica Hagy (@jessicahagy) Dan Roam, Digital Roam (@dan_roam) SXSW Synopsis: http://schedule.sxsw.com/2012/events/event_IAP9038 Hashtag: #rapidviz Sunni Brown Why Whiteboard Culture Isn’t Pervasive Many companies don’t have access to whiteboard culture. There are 3 reasons we’re lacking whiteboard culture: #1 We have nationwide lunacy around visual language Part of the doodle revolution is overturning it. Misperception: visual language = art Visual language is not art. Visual language isn’t typically emotive or emotinal. It’s not really an act of self-expression, it’s more an act of understanding something. It’s not about being beautiful or exemplary. Level of beauty not important. It’s not about ambiguity for the audience. Art is aobut allowing audience to interpet what’s going on – for visual language it’s about eliminating ambiguity. We have crazy lunatic beliefs about art: Art is a luxury good (first thing to go when times are tight) Art …

Shut Up & Draw: A Non-Artist Way to Think Visually (SXSW)

mairin March 19, 2012 Conferences / SXSW 2012Leave a comment

Preserving the Creative Culture of the Web (SXSW)

mairin March 14, 2012 Conferences / SXSW 2012Leave a comment

Hello there! I’m at SXSW (South By Southwest) 2012 this weekend, going to the interactive conference. Anyway, I tend to take copious notes when I go to talks. I thought they might be useful to a wider audience, so here you go. You can see other SXSW 2012 posts that I’ve made as well. Panelists: Nick Hasty (@jnhasty), Rhizome Kari Kraus, University of Maryland Jason Scott, Archive Team at the Internet Archive SXSW Synopsis: http://schedule.sxsw.com/2012/events/event_IAP12909 Hashtag: #digiprsrv Introduction We’re going to present a range of perspectives on archiving – how we go about it, means and methods. Discussion forums, games, user-generated content: we’ll give it a cultural context, beyond the technologies involved. It’s important to keep this, and save it. The internet community as a whole hasn’t done a great job of keeping this stuff (beyond the Internet Archive). We think it’s wroth saving we’re here to tell you why. Nick Hasty, Rhizome We present internet art, any kind of production where the intent behind it was within an artist context. Since the beginning of the web, since people could log on and connect to computers, people have been making art. Virtual worlds and games, even if it ran on …