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Dear Free Software Supporter,
As promised at this year's LibrePlanet, the Free Software
Foundation (FSF) is hosting a series of online talks and workshops
over the coming weeks. Now, we'd like to announce the five workshops
and two talks in this series. Please see the schedule below for dates,
times, workshop descriptions, and registration links. Capacity to
these events is limited, so we encourage you to register soon to
ensure your spot.
Workshops
We're excited to present the following workshops and talks:
Newk Script: Code katas to learn programming
Are you interested in a serendipitous Haskell programming learning
method on your computer with over 1,700 katas ready to train?
Newk is a Bash script using a 100% free software environment that
takes advantage of serendipity the same way you learn to speak in
childhood. No formal (or informal) classes: you are simply exposed to
spoken information of any kind and at any level in real contexts,
where everything is new, surprising, and true. Did you learn to speak?
You will learn to program!
The immortal cookbook
Join us in the journey: chart your course to digital recipe freedom!
Celebrate your favorite home-cooked meals with all their history,
comfort, and tradition. Cherish and share these meals with friends and
family. Gather and curate your delicious recipes with ease. Recall
your favorite dishes in an instant and keep them forever. This
workshop will cover practical digital recipe storage and maintenance
with free software using libre data formats. The focus will be on ease
of use and collaboration. The workshop is designed to attract people
capable at plaintext editing, including some coding experience.
Metacartes: a free/libre toolbox to chart the course to an ethical digital technology
From every point of view, the current digital model is
catastrophic. Yet, even when we are aware that we need to change the
model, it is difficult to take action because it is a complex, wicked
problem. To support individuals and collectives on their path toward
ethical digital tools and practice we developed a pedagogical tool in
the form of paper cards linked to a digital resource using QR
codes. We brought together a set of ready-to-use workshops and set of
questions. We've put them on cards that can be used for face-to-face
workshops, while the online resource can be used to get further
up-to-date information. All the contents were developed using free
software and are available online under a CC BY-SA licence.
LeanWeb: A Ruby (out of rails) web framework for static and dynamic content
LeanWeb is a very lean web framework on top of Rack and Tilt that
works for both static and dynamic content alike. The idea is being
able to build static websites first, and add dynamism when needed
without having to rely on dirty tricks. First, we will explore the
basics of LeanWeb. Then, we will create our first static website using
the tool. Finally, we'll add dynamism without pain nor guilt. For
participation, some experience with HTML and CSS is recommended. No
previous experience with Ruby is required. However, some programming
experience is recommended. To make things go smoothly, please install
Ruby on your GNU/Linux machine prior to the workshop. Installation
with your distribution's package manager is sufficient.
Digital colonialism, surveillance capitalism, and a libre software future
Why are most mainstream platforms free of charge? Why is the answer to
this first question a threat to humanity's future? What can we do
about it? With a historic perspective, citing authors like Shoshana
Zuboff, Marshall McLuhan, and Yanis Varoufakis, I try to give a
perspective of how dystopian digital platforms nowadays are personal
data extraction machines, how this machine works, the power of media
(after S. Freud and E. Bernays), and why it is so critical for the
future of humanity to choose libre software and ethical platforms.
BigCode: Open and responsible research on code-generating AI systems
While code-generating AI systems like CoPilot have emerged as a
powerful tool for professional developers, there are growing legal and
ethical concerns around the development of these models. Questions
have been raised as to whether these AI models respect current free
software licenses---both for model training and generation---and what
the social impact of this technology is on the free software
community. The BigCode project is a scientific collaboration (with
over 350 participants) working on the responsible development of
code-generating AI systems. In this talk, we discuss how we navigate
the legal-ethics-governance aspects around the development of these
models, including how we developed a permissively licensed code
dataset, give developers the option to remove their code from the
training data, redact personally identifiable information (PII), and
attribute generated programs to the original code snippet.
WorldVistA EHR version of the Department of Veterans Affairs Electronic Health Record
WorldVistA EHR is a slightly modified version of the Department of
Veterans Affairs Electronic Health Record, VistA. VistA is currently
in the process of being replaced by Oracle Cerner by the VA, but
implementation of the new system is currently on hold because it is
not performing up to expectations. Meanwhile, VistA is in use in many
places internationally, with the largest implementation in the country
of Jordan. The largest implementation in the U.S. is at Central
Regional Hospital, a state mental health hospital in North
Carolina. It will fall upon the free software community to keep this
comprehensive free software EHR available in the future.
Livestream
No worries if you don't get a spot. We will livestream and record
these sessions just like any other LibrePlanet session, and you can
view them via https://libreplanet.org/2023/live/.
Volunteer!
We are looking for remote volunteers to help provide a short intro to
our speakers, as well as to pass along interesting questions. If you
want to volunteer to assist with online session moderation, please
reach out to [email protected].
We hope to see you there!
Yours in freedom,
Miriam Bastian
Program Manager
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