LoRaWAN is a Long Range Wide Area Networking technology that has been quietly sitting in the background of many IoT systems for several years now. This month we’ll hear from speakers who were early adopters of the technology. We’ll find out what is it, how it works and, most importantly, what they have achieved with it.

This month we’ll be hosting our evening of talks online. You can join remotely from the comfort of your own home to listen to the speakers and chat in realtime with the other attendees.

AGENDA
18:15 – Join online meeting to chat with other participants
18:30 – Presentations
20:30 – Close

Please register on Eventbrite for a free ticket. We shall be live streaming via GoToWebinar and recording the talks for later posting on YouTube.

Join via GoToWebinar here: https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/3416637132043475468. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar.

LoRaWAN

Andrew Tierney

TBA.

The Things Network 5 years on

Mike Beardmore

Amazing how time flies! Mike looks at how LPWAN has progressed since he first got involved with The Things Network in 2015. He will look at the technology (radio, devices and code) involved, how to build and deploy your project, and finish with a look to the future of TTN with 5G arriving.

Mike Beardmore has surfed the wave of opportunities for a creator since the transistor replaced the ‘tube’. A life of learning about constant change has been a foundation for working with the recent LPWAN blooming. An active Maker using additive & subtractive tools, he is an advocate for Hackspaces, OpenSource and Creative Commons.

LoRa trials (and tribulations)

Paul Tanner

A few years ago a group of us came together to see what we could do about measuring actual pollution levels “where you are”. We were disappointed that the only hyper-localised data available came from hard-to-trust models that used widely-spaced sensors.

We won some funding to build and test a prototype based on good quality sensors that communicated via a connected smart phone to a cloud-based data store, the data being visualised on a web app. This allowed people to compare alternative routes and select the best ones.

The main feedback from these trials was that we needed to make the device much easier to use, smaller and lighter so we looked at ways to make the sensor self-contained.

Along came LoRaWAN as one way to achieve this. The prototype was completely redesigned and we have been testing and refining that since. Unhappily, trialling with schools is currently suspended for obvious reasons but we think we are getting there.

The talk will be about our learnings and future options under consideration.

Paul Tanner is an experienced engineer and project manager. He has held management
positions in several tech startups and developed numerous electronic and software products. He has worked on a diverse range of IT projects in the roles of CTO, project manager, developer and architect.

Paul’s recent projects have been focused on practical implementation of the “Internet of Things”. These have included two consumer energy portals, an assisted living care-in-the-home system, an assistive street and an energy-optimised smart house and
(currently) a portable pollution monitor. He has also been an advisor and beta tester for a smart heating product.

Paul now focuses on “public good” projects, especially in renewable energy, assisted living and cleantech. He is open to whatever roles are appropriate either as an individual or by bringing in a small team.

Paul is a graduate of MIT with a BS in Electrical Engineering. Whilst not busy with his family he is a “maker” and clean energy enthusiast.

Note: Please aim to connect by 18:15 as the event will start at 18:30 prompt.

At this evening meeting in London, we’ll be looking at how Open Source is used in Government.

AGENDA
18:00 – Tea, coffee
18:30 – Presentation
20:30 – Close

Please register on Eventbrite for a free ticket. Or, we shall be live streaming via GoToWebinar and recording the talks for later posting on YouTube.

Join via GoToWebinar here: https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/5941389606457776397. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar.

Open Source Excuses – busting the myths

Terence Eden

Why don’t government departments and NHS organisations want to adopt open source? This talk looks at common reasons given. It will give you real life examples of barriers to coding in the open, and practical tips for adopting open source.

Terence Eden is the Head of Open Technology for NHSX. He is a technology & policy expert. He teaches government courses on AI and ethics. He was formerly the UK Government’s representative to the W3C. He speaks around the world on open standards, open source software, and open data.

Current political challenges and opportunities for Open Source in Europe

Astor Nummelin Carlberg

The campaign to save Open Source development from the EU’s Copyright Directive was indicative of the current status of Open Source advocacy in the EU—while ultimately successful, it was more reactive than proactive. The most important lesson from this campaign was that Open Source was not targeted by policy makers, simply forgotten and misunderstood. This suggests that while Open Source has gone mainstream, Open Source advocacy has not kept up.

As there are both more opportunities and regulatory risks for Open Source in the European Union, more, if not all, Open Source community stakeholders need to increase their capacity to deal with policy making. At the least, we need to make sure that Open Source never again becomes an unintended regulatory casualty. There are several very tangible steps that can be taken to do this. Since Open Source is becoming ubiquitous at the same time as there is an eagerness to regulate tech in the EU, the time is now to mature Open Source advocacy and increase its effectiveness.

Astor Nummelin Carlberg is OpenForum Europe’s Policy Director, responsible for policy development and advocacy. Before joining the team he was an Accredited Parliamentary Assistant in the European Parliament, and has studied in the United States and Germany. He has extensive experience of European policy making processes, communications and catalysing networks and communities for advocacy impact.

Making the case for open with Governments

Irina Bolychevsky

Irina Bolychevsky is the founder and director of Redecentralize.org. She’s a digital strategist and expert on data, open data, data platforms, standards, privacy and decentralised technology. She led the ckan open source data platform to international adoption, served on Open Knowledge Foundation’s senior management team and now as a board member and developed the personal data infrastructure programme within the UK’s Government Digital Service. She developed the Smart Dubai’s and UAE federal policy, regulatory, commercial and technical frameworks for data exchange and ran one of the first UK data trust pilots and researched digital identity for the Open Data Institute.

At this evening meeting online, we’ll be welcoming four women, all of whom are pursuing a career in open source. This is a joint meeting with BCS Women.

Please register on Eventbrite for a free ticket. We shall also be livestreaming via GoToMeeting, and later posting the videos on our YouTube channel for those who are unable to make it.

The importance of open standards in addressing Big Tech monopoly power

Irina Bolychevsky

From advocates, politicians and technologists, calls for doing something about big tech grow louder by the day. Yet concrete ideas are few or failing to reach the mainstream. This talk will cover what breaking up big tech would mean and why it’s not enough. Irina will propose an open intervention that will give people a real choice and a way out of controlled walled gardens. Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple are not natural monopolies and we need to regulate them to support competition and alternative business models.

Irina Bolychevsky is the founder and director of Redecentralize.org. She’s a digital strategist and expert on data, open data, data platforms, standards, privacy and decentralised technology. She led the ckan open source data platform to international adoption, served on Open Knowledge Foundation’s senior management team and now as a board member and developed the personal data infrastructure programme within the UK’s Government Digital Service. She developed the Smart Dubai’s and UAE federal policy, regulatory, commercial and technical frameworks for data exchange and ran one of the first UK data trust pilots and researched digital identity for the Open Data Institute.

See Ira talking on this topic on YouTube.

Modelling and simulating textiles with TexGen

Dr Lousie Brown

This talk will outline the development of the TexGen project, describing its use for modelling various types of textiles and the types of simulations which are run and the mechanical and manufacturing properties which can be predicted using the models. It will look at how it has been advantageous to release the software as open-source rather than taking a more traditional commercialisation route.

Dr Louise Brown is a Senior Research Fellow in the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Nottingham. She currently holds an EPSRC Research Software Engineering Fellowship on Software for Textile Modelling and Simulation. On completion of her PhD, Design of a Filament Winding Cell, she worked for several years in the Computer Science Department at Nottingham working on automated design tools for CAD systems for industrial embroidery machines. She worked from home as a self-employed software engineer for thirteen years before returning to the Composites Research Group at Nottingham in 2009. She is responsible for development of TexGen (http://texgen.sourceforge.net ), open source software for modelling the geometry of textile structures. The software has an increasing user base worldwide with over 41,000 downloads since its initial release in 2006. She has implemented new functionality to include modelling of the complex 3D weaves being used increasingly by the aerospace industry and is involved in research to optimise more complex textile structures.

Collaboration on the Kernel mailing lists

Dawn Foster

While there is quite a bit of data about the people and companies who commit Linux kernel code, there isn’t much data about how people work together on the kernel mailing lists where they decide what patches will be accepted. Using a few of the top subsystem mailing lists as examples, Dawn Foster will share her PhD research into how people collaborate on the kernel mailing lists, including network visualizations of mailing list interactions between contributors. You can expect to learn more about the people, their employers, and other data that impacts how people participate on the mailing lists. For example, do timezones influence collaboration? How about source code contributions? Dawn will also give a brief overview of her 20+ year career both before and after going back to school to get her PhD along with some information about her involvement in OpenUK.

Dawn is an open source strategist and Kubernetes contributor at Pivotal, now part of VMware. She has 20+ years of experience at companies like Intel and Puppet with expertise in community building, strategy, open source software, metrics, and more. She is passionate about bringing people together through a combination of online communities and real-world events along with analyzing the data associated with participation in developer and open source communities. Dawn is on the Governing Board of the Linux Foundation’s CHAOSS project and is a maintainer for several of the working groups. She is also on the board of OpenUK, a UK organisation committed to develop and sustain UK leadership in Open Technology. She holds a PhD from the University of Greenwich along with an MBA and a BS in Computer Science. She has spoken at dozens of industry events, including many Linux Foundation events, OSCON, SXSW, FOSDEM and more.

Towards A More Gender-Inclusive Open Source Community

Dr Becky Faith

Dr. Becky Faith is a Research Fellow and Leader of the Digital and Technology cluster at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex. Becky’s professional experience and research interests encompass gender and technology, mobile communication studies, human computer interaction and technology for social change.

Becky has fifteen years’ strategic and programme experience working in ICT for development and technology for human rights organisations. She started her career in digital start-ups, working on the UK’s first e-commerce platforms in the 1990s.

Becky will be talking about her research on  ‘Towards A More Gender-Inclusive Open Source Community’; which set out to better understand  why  women are underrepresented and do not always feel welcome or supported in open source communities. She will be talking about what the open source community can do to encourage participation by women around the world; what strategies work best to achieve greater participation? Conformist, reformist or transformist? Do we help women cope with the inequalities they face or do we try and address the transform the unequal power structures that underpin these issues?

This is our quarterly meetup for the London open source community, focusing on RISC-V, hosted by the BCS Open Source Specialist Group and the UK Open Source Hardware User Group.  These meetings provide an opportunity to share the latest ideas around open source in the RISC-V ecosystem, combined with plenty of time for networking. Please discuss, give feedback and suggest future topics on the London Open Source Meetup group event page.

At this evening meeting we have three talks on the MaxineVM on RISC-V, Embench on RISC-V and open source licensing with RISC-V.  One of our speakers, Florin-Gabriel Blanaru, was winner of the inaugural RISC-V Student of the Year competition.  At this meeting he will be presented with his award and then speak about his work. The presentation will be made by Mary Bennett, Chair of the RISC-V Foundation University Outreach committee.

Note. This meeting is at the new BCS London offices, 25 Copthall Ave, EC2R 7BP.

The talks will be live streamed and available on afterwards on the BCS Open Source Specialist Group YouTube channel.

Tea/coffee will be served from 6:00pm, with talks starting at 6:30pm. Each talk will last around 30 minutes and include plenty of time for questions, after which there will be opportunity to network both in the BCS  and later at the Globe pub round the corner.

We shall be livestreaming and recording the talks for later posting on YouTube via GoToWebinar. Registration details to follow shortly.  Please register at:

attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/1776873866939508491

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar.

Free and Open Source Licensing and RISC-V

Andrew Katz, @andrewjskatz

Andrew will present the results of his research on the current state of open core licensing, and his thoughts on the direction of travel for licensing in the future. He will also give an update on the CERN Open Hardware licence, and how V2 has been redrafted with the concerns of developers of ASICs and FPGAs.

Andrew Katz, a partner at Moorcrofts LLP, is one of the UK’s leading free and open-source lawyers. He drafted the widely-used solderpad Open Hardware Licence and is on the core legal team for drafting the CERN Open Hardware licence. Andrew is a Fellow of the Free Software Foundation Europe and the Open Forum Academy, and for 7 years held the post of visiting lecturer at Queen Mary, University of London. He is a visiting researcher at the University of Skövde, Sweden where he has co-authored papers whose findings have been adopted into Swedish government policy. 

Andrew qualified as a barrister and was called to the bar (Inner Temple) in 1991, and has now re-qualified and practises as a solicitor in England and Wales. He is also an Irish solicitor (non-practising).

MaxineVM on RISC-V

Florin-Gabriel Blanaru

In this talk we will talk about MaxineVM’s, a metacircular research VM, in relationship to the RISC-V architecture.

A short overview of the current JVM ecosystem on the RISC-V architecture will be presented first.

Next we will proceed with a high level view of MaxineVM along with a description of the work that had to be accomplished for the RISC-V port.

A comparison of MaxineVM’s performance against OpenJDK Zero will follow and we will conclude with a description of our current and future research on safe code modification on architectures without SMC hardware support.

Florin-Gabriel Blanaru is currently a research software engineer at the University of Manchester.  During his bachelor’s degree at the University of Manchester, he successfully ported MaxineVM to the RISC-V architecture. He is interested in all the abstraction layers between the hardware and the programming languages, including computer architecture, operating systems and managed runtime systems. Florin is the inaugural winner of the RISC-V Student of the Year award.

Evaluating RISC-V using the Embench™ 0.5 Benchmark Suite

Jeremy Bennett, @jeremypbennett, @embenchorg

Dr Jeremy Bennett is Chief Executive of Embecosm, a company based in the UK and Germany providing services developing open source compilers, operating systems and chip models. He is Vice-Chair of the Embench Task Group, and has been one of the main developers of the benchmark infrastructure.  Jeremy is a Fellow of the BCS where he serves as Chair of the Open Source Specialist Group.