LibrePlanet 2021

LibrePlanet 2021 was a virtual free software conference that took place the weekend of March 20th and March 21st, 2021.

Keynotes

• The Free Software Foundation Keynote At LibrePlanet 2021
• A European Open Technology Fund: Building sustainable public funding for free software
• Machine agency: Infrastructure for creative automation
• Ten years of empowering activists AND everyday people through free mobile software

Video Recordings

• "Logiciel libre, société libre": Free software activism in France and Europe
  
  
  Founded in 1996, April is the main French advocacy association devoted to promoting and protecting free/libre software. Since 1996, it has been a major player in the democratization and the spread of free software and open standards to the general public, professionals and institutions in the French-speaking world.
  
• A European Open Technology Fund: Building sustainable public funding for free software
  
  
  Julia Reda, former European Parliament member, and cofounder of the European Union's Free and Open Source Software Audit (FOSSA) project, argues that it is the governments responsibility to invest in the maintenance and improvement of free software - and that it is possible to make that happen.
  
• A dispatch from the front lines of right to repair
  
  
  "FUD fighting on the front lines of right to repair: As our homes, workplaces and public spaces fill with Internet-connected "smart" stuff, a digital right to repair is critical to protecting consumer rights, property rights and civil liberties. Despite that, electronics giants like Apple, Samsung, LG and General Electric have snuffed out scores of proposed state laws seeking to create such a right. How? By scaring legislators with tales of device hacking, cyber stalking and identity theft."
  
• An information theoretic model of privacy and security metrics
  
  
  "An information theoretic model of privacy and security metrics - or - how I learned to stop worrying about password meters and love the dice." From LibrePlanet 2021.
  
• Beyond "learning to code": How Tech Learning Collective merges IT training with emancipatory political action
  
  
  "What good is a pen if the paper it touches can refuse to show its ink? What good is your app when your API key is revoked? Through metaphor and with a unique apprenticeship-based pedagogy, Tech Learning Collective (TLC) is empowering users by doing exactly what code boot camps and corporate-funded "learn to code" programs don't: TLC tells students to ignore new Web frameworks and focus instead on the lowest layers of an IT stack like physical network and hardware storage devices."
  
• Care about your users: don't minify your JS!
  
  
  A lightning talk by Sebastian Crane at LibrePlanet 2021 where he argues that minifying free JavaScript code hurts users freedom and their ability read, understand and re-use it.
  
• Critical Free Software: The High Priority Projects Lists
  
  
  An update from the Free Software Foundations High Priority Projects committee at LibrePlanet 2021. The High Priority Projects initiative, first launched in 2005, draws attention to a relatively small number of projects of great strategic importance to the goal of freedom for all computer users.
  
• Empower users by asking them for money
  
  
  "I've always been a free software programmer, a contractor to the rich and already powerful so they could use free software to its fullest. But, users, normal everyday users, are left out, and their needs are often different from business, universities and other large organizations who can afford to pay developers."
  
• Free/libre solutions to address the shortage of ventilators
  
  
  "Over 100 teams attempted to create free/libre solutions to address the shortage of ventilators caused by the COVID-19 pandemic; we created a large spreadsheet evaluating all of them along many coordinates."
  
• Freeing networks where we need freedom most
  
  
  The struggle for the freedom of Internet is ever growing. Corporations, and their partner in crime, governments, come up with new clever ideas to restrict free flow of information. Overlords of the truth are trying to recover old control, which the Internet has eroded everywhere in favor of the people.
  
• Here's how you can get all your day-to-day computing done with free software
  
  
  "Alice, 11, has given multiple talks at technical conferences and will go over more than 10 programs that will replace proprietary with free software." This great 40 minute talk from LibrePlanet 2021 is absolutely worth watching and sharing.
  
• How to free the imagination
  
  
  Many issues exist in the comic book industry: How to solve the problem of unauthorized sharing? How to protect authors from the asymmetrical relation between them and publishers? Where to find funding to live more fairly when doing art? How can authors be more independent with the tools they use? How to manage derivations, fan fiction and commercial reuse?
  
• How to make more users love free software: Double the love, double the freedom
  
  
  "In past years, free software projects have increased their usability considerably. Still, one of the main reasons users with no technical background don't use many free software projects in their daily routine is that some projects don't offer good usability, which drives them into choosing proprietary solutions." From LibrePlanet 2021.
  
• IFixit: The Right to Repair
  
  
  What if everyone had free access to a repair manual for everything they owned? Making repair accessible to everyone is the best shot we’ve got at reducing e-waste and starting to make our high-tech lives sustainable.
  
• Informal chatter to formal decisions: How-to
  
  
  "So many repetitive conversations? No forward movement? Everyone getting along mostly, but not sure how to be decisive without clear hierarchy? What could legitimate authorization look like in a decentralized world anyway? This talk touches on specific steps anyone can take." From LibrePlanet 2021.
  
• Ingestum: A libre NLP document ingestion library
  
  
  Many NLP projects that depend upon the analysis of documents are impaired by the difficulty of transforming source material into a computer-readable format. For example, PDF files are designed for human consumption but can look like a bag full of words to a computer. To address this problem engineers at Sorcero developed Ingestum, a library that is used to "devour" content sources, outputting a format that can be used for additional processing.
  
• Introduction to CiviCRM
  
  
  CiviCRM is free constituent relationship management software that empowers thousands of nonprofits around the world. This video provides an overview on what CiviCRM is, what it can do, and how organizations can use it to achieve their mission.
  
• Jami and how it empowers users
  
  
  Jami is free software for universal communication which respects the freedoms and privacy of its users. Jami is an official GNU package with a main goal of providing a framework for virtual communications, along with a series of end-user applications for audio/video calling and conferencing, text messaging, and file transfer.
  
• Labor movements and the free software community
  
  
  "The labor movement and free software are natural complements to one another. Both rely on (often decentralized) groups of workers that commit to a higher purpose in the pursuit of building something that will advance people on a larger scale."
  
• Lessons Framasoft has learned
  
  
  Framasoft is a small, French nonprofit, made up of only thirty-five members and ten employees. We've been promoting free/libre software and its culture for more than fifteen years.
  
• Libre designers do exist (and survive)
  
  
  "Libre designers do exist (and survive). Let's explore the pros and cons, experiences, job opportunities and more, from experiences gathered for over 15 years in the field."
  
• Machine agency: Infrastructure for creative automation
  
  
  Keynote at LibrePlanet 2021: "How can we harness the precision of machines for the creativity of individuals? Automation and computer control of machines is increasingly widespread. However, it's often employed for dull, dirty, or dangerous tasks. This is partially because setting up these systems is complex and time consuming."
  
• Making dollars and sense of free software funding's future
  
  
  "Sustainably funding public goods is hard, just ask your local government. We know free software benefits everyone, whether or not users contributed to its development. How then can we reach the world of everyone working on software they love while making a livable wage?"
  
• Openwifi project: The dawn of the free/libre WiFi chip
  
  
  In past decades, free software has played a key role towards the free and trusted Internet. In recent years, free software processor projects like RISC-V have pushed forward to construct free devices and computers. However, the radio connectivity of the device still relies on the black box silicons (WiFi, BLE, cellular chips).
  
• Plom: Paperless Open Marking
  
  
  We present Paperless Open Marking (Plom), a software system for giving tests on paper, but marking and returning them online. We (undergraduate students) worked on this software as a summer project.
  
• REUSE: Simple steps to declare your copyright and licenses
  
  
  Free software licensing can be tiresome. But setting the conditions for the use and reuse of your code is extremely important. To make developers' lives easier, there is the REUSE initiative. This presentation explains simple yet powerful best practices for defining licenses and copyright holders.
  
• Remote education: My children's freedom and privacy at stake
  
  
  "During COVID-19 confinement, I saw how all teachers were choosing proprietary video conferencing programs over free software for the continuation of online lessons. I had two options: do nothing about it and let proprietary video conferencing tools spread among my children and their classmates, or try to fight back against this injustice."
  
• Richard Stallman: Unjust computing clamps down
  
  
  Honorary Doctor Richard Stallman elaborated on the growing injustices in computing in a 46 minutes long talk titled Unjust computing clamps down at LibrePlanet 2021 on March 21st, 2021. He also briefly mentioned that he is once again a Free Software Foundation director, and that he won't be stepping down again.
  
• SecureDrop Workstation: Handling unsafe documents safely
  
  
  SecureDrop is a whistleblowing platform originally created in 2012 for journalists to accept leaked documents safely from anonymous sources. It's used by dozens of news organizations including The Guardian, The Washington Post and The New York Times. This talk (at LibrePlanet 2021) introduces the SecureDrop Workstation, the next-generation platform aimed at helping journalists communicate with sources in a high-security environment.
  
• Ten years of empowering activists AND everyday people through free mobile software
  
  
  "From bringing OTR, Tor, GnuGP, FFMPEG and SQLCipher to Android, to developing and supporting apps like Orbot, Tor Browser for Android, Onion Browser, F-Droid, ChatSecure, Haven and more, we at Guardian Project have been pretty busy for the last decade. Through ups and downs, iterations and improvements, we have a lot of interesting stories to tell about where we've been, and where we are headed." From LibrePlanet 2021.
  
• The Free Software Foundation Keynote At LibrePlanet 2021
  
  
  The Free Software Foundation keynote speech at LibrePlanet 2021 featuring FSF President Geoff Knauth, FSF Executive Director John Sullivan and others. The video is one hour and six minutes long.
  
• The defense of the GNOME Foundation
  
  
  In August 2019, GNOME was notified that it was being sued in the state of California over a broad patent which allegedly covered Shotwell, a photo management application. The plaintiff? A prolific filer of patent suits, and a patent assertion entity. This was the first time that a free software project has been sued for patent infringement.
  
• The state of software in schools and what to do about it
  
  
  This talk will briefly addresses why free software is important in education and provide examples of how proprietary software is rapidly deployed in schools.
  
• Usable security for end-users: How Tor improves usability without compromising user privacy
  
  
  The Tor network, used by 2.5 million users every day, protects their privacy via “onion routing,” which directs Internet traffic – email, instant messages, online posts, Web form visits, and more – through a multilayered network that obfuscates who the user is, thus concealing their identity and location.
  
• User Respecting Software - free software development driven by users
  
  
  Why is it that some free software projects, although started at the same time as comparable propriety projects, are still playing catch-up in terms of number of users and desired features? Features comparisons as well as the network effect and how well known a piece of software is play into this, but what features do users find most important? We can’t make “better” software until we know what features users actually care about.
  

The LibrePlanet conference team will post videos at media.libreplanet.org towards the end of March 2021.