Monthly archives: May 2018


FOSS for everyday life – Thursday 21st June 2018

Cancelled

Unfortunately we have had to cancel the OSSG meetup on 21st of June. We hope to reschedule our speakers later in the year. Apologies for the inconvenience, but remember that OSHCamp is still taking place this month.

Here for the record are the details of talks we hope to hold at a future time.

Deploying GPG to non-technical users

Introducing the use of cryptography in to day to day workflow can be overwhelming for new user, not helped by concepts which can be difficult to grasp, especially for non-technical users. This talk will cover a small scale deployment of GPG which is currently in progress for a team of 30 members and how the use of GPG was implemented within an organisation.

Sevan Janiyan is founder of Venture 37, which provides system administration & consultancy services. As a fan of operating systems and computers with different CPU architectures, in his spare time he maintains builds of open source software on a variety of systems featuring PowerPC, SPARC and armv7l CPUs.

Hammerspoon: Staggeringly powerful macOS desktop automation

Hammerspoon exposes many parts of macOS to the simple scripting language Lua. Its goal is to make the most powerful and flexible tool for serious power users to automate and customise as many things as possible. In this talk we’ll look at the history of automation on Apple computers, how Hammerspoon works, and some of the excellent things it can help you do. Of course, it’s Open Source, so you can also jump in and help make it even better!

Chris Jones has been creating, using, and advocating for Open Source software, since the mid-1990s. He’s spent the last 12 years of his professional life working on/with Open Source – the first half at Canonical (creators of Ubuntu) and since then working on OpenStack at HP and Red Hat.

After 13 years of zealously running only Linux on his desktops/laptops, he has spent the last 8 years recovering as a macOS user, but has nevertheless retained his passion for contributing to Open Source.


Funding Open Source – Thursday 17 May 2018

An evening meeting, where we will hear three talks on how to fund open source projects and businesses. This is a joint meeting with BCS Entrepreneurs, BCS Young Professionals Group, BCS Women and the UK Open Source Hardware User Group. Venue is the BCS Offices at 5 Southampton St, London WC2E 7HA from 6-8pm.

Registration link: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/open-source-sg-how-to-fund-open-source-projects-and-businesses-registration-45639935275

Each talk will last 30 minutes and include plenty of time for questions. I look forward to seeing you there.

Thinking differently: new approaches to funding the development of open source conservation technologies

Alasdair Davies

An active conservationist and technologist all his working life, Alasdair Davies is combining his two passions with a third – openness – to bring affordable, customizable technology to the field through the Arribada Initiative. As a Shuttleworth Foundation Fellow, he is designing, developing and producing open source conservation technologies in partnership with leading wildlife charities such as WWF and the Zoological Society of London, employing open approaches and licences to drive down costs by introducing new community-based funding models.

Video of Alasdair’s talk on YouTube

Funding open – tactics and stories from civic tech

Irina Bolychevsky

Irina is passionate about products and using technology to make things better. She spent many years working on open data at Open Knowledge as one of the directors and ckan product owner, at web startups, and most recently as a data consultant for W3C, the Open Data Institute and the UK, Dubai and UAE governments. She co-founded redecentralize.org—a project to promote and bring together people working on and interested in decentralised digital technologies.

Video of Irina’s talk on YouTube

Other ways of funding open source

Ben Nickolls

Ben Nickolls is a software developer turned product manager building a sustainable source of funding for open source maintainers at Tidelift. He is an advisor to The Centre for Cultivation of Technology, The Ford Foundation, The Sloan Foundation and helps organise the annual open source sustainability conference Sustain.org and the Core Internet Infrastructure working group. In his spare times he rides bikes, designs boardgames and walks his dog.

Video of Ben’s talk on YouTube

We anticipate this evening may be oversubscribed, so please book promptly. We shall be videoing the talks for later posting on YouTube for those who are unable to make it.