This is our annual lightning talks evening, where anyone has the opportunity to speak for up to 10 minutes on their favorite open source topic. As always the meeting is held jointly with the UK Open Source User Group.  There is still room for one or two more talks, so if you would like to speak, please send a title, brief abstract and biography to either Jeremy Bennett or Julian Kunkel so we can add you to the program.

The meeting will start with the Annual General Meeting (AGM), which everyone is welcome to attend.

AGENDA
18:00 – Feel free to join the online meeting to chat with other participants
18:30 – AGM
18:50 – Lightning talks
20:00 – Closing discussion

This will be a hybrid meeting, with some people attending in person in London and others able to join via videoconference.  For those wishing to attend in person, registration is essential.  We anticipate numbers attending will still be restricted.

Register here to attend in person

For remote attendees, there is no requirement to register, you can just connect to the videoconference using BigBlueButton using this link.  Thank you to GWDG for providing hosting for this meeting.  We are also recording the talks for later posting on our YouTube channel.

The live stream link will be open from 18:00 for networking, and the event will start at 18:30 prompt. We’ll keep the link open afterwards for discussion.

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The videos are available in our YouTube Playlist.

Annual General Meeting (AGM)

Everyone is welcome to attend, but only BCS members may vote. We will have brief reports on the past year’s activities and then elect a new committee. Note: non-BCS members may stand for all committee posts except Chair, Treasurer, and Membership secretary. We are seeking nominations for the following posts. At present we have the following nominations declared:

• Chair/Advocacy and outreach: ^†Dr Julian Kunkel
• Treasurer: ^†Dr Richard Miller
• Membership Secretary: no nominations yet received
• Inclusion officer: ^†Prof Cornelia Boldyref
• Web supremo: ^†Simon Worthington
• Early career/Student representatives: ^†Daniel Broomhead, ^†Mary Bennett
• Committee members: ^†Alan Bennett, ^†Jeremy Bennett, Reza Alvi

^† Existing committee member standing for re-election

Our thanks to Sevan Janiyan, who is standing down from the committee, after many years helping organize our events.  We depend on an active committee to put on all our events and drive our advocacy and outreach work. Please consider putting yourself forward.

A Roadmap for BCS OSSG in 2021/2022

Julian Kunkel

Julian will present his plan for the next year of activity by the BCS Open Source SG.

Julian is currently the Membership Secretary of BCS OSSG and leads on Advocacy. He is the nominee for Chair for the next year.

Keeping a project going

Chris Swan

Chris’s Raspberry Pi controlled sous vide water bath has been used 227 times over the course of 8.5yrs. Some parts of the project remain original, but many have needed replacement. This talk will cover the effort needed to sustain something over years.

Viewpoint Linux

Sevan Janiyan

Sevan will present the Viewpoint Linux distribution.

Sevan Janiyan supports numerous open-source projects, including OpenBSD, NetBSD, FreeBSD and CoovaChilli.

A high-angle laptop stand

Jeremy Bennett

I usually work using a large (32″) monitor, with my laptop alongside.  Almost all my work is on the main monitor, with the laptop having a browser window with tabs for all my various comms channels.  In order to avoid a stiff neck, I need the laptop screen to be aligned close to the top of the main monitor.  Something that can be achieved by opening up my laptop until it is nearly flat and then raising it around 70mm.  However, you can’t buy a laptop stand designed to hold a laptop in this position.

I will present my high-angle laptop stand, built almost entirely from wood reclaimed from pallets and packing cases.  The design is open source and has the flexibility for some components to be 3D printed if desired.  The talk will include a demonstration of the completed laptop stand.

Dr. Jeremy Bennett is Chief Executive of Embecosm, an international open-source software consultancy specializing in compiler development, processor modeling, embedded operating system bring-up, and AI.  Since 2017 he has served as Chair of the BCS Open Source Specialist Group.

Declarative Co-existence of VMs and Containers on a common Kubernetes-native platform

Vishal Anand

Virtual machines (VMs) on one platform and containers on another, technically, are a relic of bygone times. How about having both on the same platform? In addition, what if that comes with proven open-source technologies from the leader itself? Organizations can now bring virtualized applications that cannot be containerized in the given time and budget on a common production-grade Kubernetes platform for management, operational consistency and efficiency – declaratively automated.

Vishal Anand is Chief Architect, Thought Leader Technologist and Sr. Inventor in IBM – currently innovating modern hybrid cloud journeys for accelerated digital transformations. He is Fellow of BCS.

One-Wire

Andy Bennett

Andy Bennett has served on the events sub-committee of BCS OSSG for many years.

Hackathons in the Open-Source Domain

Daniel Broomhead

Daniel Broomhead serves as the Early Career/Student representative on the BCS OSSG committee.

Testing LLVM with GCC

Mary Bennett, Embecosm

LLVM has two main test suites:

• the regression test suite tests the compilation from source to IR; and
• the nightly test suite is a body of often large applications which are compiled and executed.

However, there is no large body of tests of detailed functionality which is compiled right down to the target object code and executed. At previous conferences, we have described the changes we have made to allow the GCC test suite to be used for nightly public regression testing of LLVM for RISC-V. Here we will discuss the necessary transformations to the testsuite to support LLVM.

Mary Bennett is a software tool chain engineer at Embecosm. She serves on the advocacy and outreach subcommittee of BCS OSSG.