The 2019 incarnation of foss-north is less than a month away. This year we’re extending the conference in two directions: a training day and a community day. This time, I wanted to write about the training day.
The training day, April 10, is an additional day for those who want to extend the conference with a day of dedicated training. I’m very happy to have two experienced and well known trainers on side: Michael Kerrisk and Chris Simmonds. Both has years of training experience.
Michael will teach about the details in dynamic linking. The topic may seem trivial, but when you start scratching the surface, there are a lot of details to discover such as how to handle version compatibility, how symbol resolution really works, and so on. You can read more about the Building and Using Shared Libraries on Linux training here.
Chris will run a getting started with embedded Linux training. Using BeagleBone Black devices the participants will learn how to build linux for the target, how to get devices such as GPIO and i2c working and more. You can read more about the Fast Track to Embedded Linux training here.
The best part of enrolling for training at foss-north is that you also get full access to the two conference days, and that you help fund the conference itself. If you are interested, check out the tickets page.
This is the last week of early bird tickets for foss-north 2019. The program has not yet been set, so getting one of these tickets, you trust us to deliver a great conference – something that we’re very thankful for.
The trainings are open enrollment courses at a bargain price, where parts of the dividends goes to financing the conference. This year we have two great trainers: Michael Kerrisk of manpage and The Linux Programming Interface fame, and Chris Simmonds, the man behind the Mastering Embedded Linux Programming book and a trainer since more than 15 years. The trainings held are: Building and Using Shared Libraries on Linux and Fast Track to Embedded Linux. These are both one day courses held in a workshop format.
Browsing through the replies to the call for papers, I am convinced that the 2019 foss-north will be the best one this far – and the past three years have been great.
PS. If you want to help out – give me a ping at e8johan – gmail – com. We need a couple of helping hands during the event days to help make sure everything runs smoothly.
The first weekend of February means Belgium, Brussels and fosdem. To those of you who has not been there yet, it is a huge, chaotic, crowded, but also wonderful event.
But first I was met by a huge snow storm and the following chaos. :-)
I’ve been to fosdem a number of years now, and I was brave enough to take to the stage last year. In the early days, I spent most time in various dev rooms, either hacking myself or listening to talks. For me, fosdem has changed from this to more of a social event. I’ve spent hours talking the the K-building, made sure to meet people I’ve interacted with online for the first time, and generally hang out and enjoy the company of a lot of smart people.
Another side mission of mine this year was to do some foss-north promotion. As you might know, I’m organizing the foss-north event, and I had the opportunity to meet with both speakers and sponsors during fosdem (call for papers close in ~1.5weeks, just sayin’). I also took the opportunity to hang some flyers at the venue, so hopefully some people discovered the event that way.
As I pointed out earlier, the weather was not that great, but for a few moments on Sunday morning the sun peeked out between the clouds and you could almost feel a sense of spring in the air.
After the event I took the opportunity to visit Brussels with some friends. I finally got around to visit Atomium. Such an amazing place! I love the mix of the 50’s architecture and the contemporary exhibitions in some of the spheres. This place was way better than I expected it to be.
So fosdem delivered again. Chaos, so many meetings with new people as well as old friends and acquaintances, great contents, and a generally great experience in Brussels. I’m already looking forward to next year’s event!
For the fourth year running, foss-north is taking place. Now bigger than ever.
It all started as a one day conference in a room with too much people in it. We gathered ten speakers and started something that continues to this day.
110 ten people in a room for 110 people.
Back then we, the three organizers: Jeremiah, Mikael and myself, joked over beers that we should have trainings, conference, community rooms and much more. A moderated FOSDEM was a crude description of what we wanted to build. But this was only us dreaming away.
During the past years we’ve tried different venues. We’ve gone from one day, one track to two days and two tracks. This year we decided to go for it all: four days, trainings, a community day and the conference.
Organizing a conference is to manage a chicken and egg type problem. You need speakers to get sponsors, and you need sponsors to get speakers to the venue. The same applies to the audience – visistors wants speakers, speakers wants visitors. This is why it takes time to establish a conference.
Last year we felt that we reached a tipping point – the call for papers was so full that we had to extend the conference with an additional day. We simply could not pick the right contents for a single day. This means that we feel that the conference part is established. If you want to speak, the call for papers is still open.
That takes us to the next steps. The community day consists of various projects and groups organizing workshops, hackathons, install fests, development sprints and whatnot throughout the city. We find venues (usually conference rooms) and projects and hope that people will come visit the various events. Again, starting from zero projects, zero venues and no real idea how many visitors to expect, we are trying to put this together. At the time of writing, it looks great. We have 7 projects and 5 venues fixed, but we are still looking for both projects and venues. If you want to join in, look at our call for projects.
The same logic applies to the training. Now we have training contents, all we need are visitors. The great thing is that our teachers, Michael Kerrisk and Chris Simmonds, are great to work with and understand our situation. Now we just have to work hard to make sure that we find students for them.
The final piece of the puzzle, which is not always visible to speakers and visitors, is the hunt for sponsors. Venues does not come for free, and we believe in compensating our speakers for their costs, thus we need sponsors. We offer the opportunity to host a booth during the conference days and the chance to meet our audience. We also believe that helping a conference focused on free and open source, is a way to contribute to the free and open source movement. For this we have a network of sponsors that we’ve worked with in the past (thank you all!) but as the conference grows, we need more help. If you want to join in, have a look at our call for sponsors
I’ve written a lot about speakers, sponsors and projects. Now all we need are visitors – lots and lots of visitors. So bring your friends to Gothenburg and join us at foss-north. The early bird tickets are available now. Get yours here!
Editing videos for foss-gbg and foss-north has turned into something that I do on almost a montly basis. I’ve tried a few workflows, but landed in using kdenlive and, when needed, Audacity. I’m not a very advanced audio person, so if kdenlive would incorporate basic noise reduction and a compressor, I stay within one tool.
Before I describe the actual process, I want to mention something about the hardware involved. There are so many things that you can do when producing this type of contents. However, all the pieces that you add to the puzzle is another point of failure. The motto is KISS – Keep It Simple Stupid. Hence, we use a single video camera with an integrated microphone. This is either an action cam, or a JVC video camera. In most cases this just works. In some cases the person talking has a microphone and then we try to place the camera close to a speaker. It has happened that we’ve recorded someone whispering just by the camera…
As we don’t have a dedicated microphone for the speaker, we get an audio stream that includes the reaction of the audience. That is in my opinion a good thing. It captures the mood of the event. However, we also get quite a lot of background noise which is bad. For this, I rely on this workflow from Rich Bowen. Basically, I extract the audio stream from the recording, massage it in Audacity, and then re-introduce it.
I’ve found it easier to cut the video prior to fixing the audio. This usually means find the start and the end of the talk, but in some cases it is more complex. E.g. removing parts of the Q&A due to reasons, or cutting out a demo that makes no sense when watching the video.
Once in Audacity, I generally pick out a “silent” part of the recoding to learn a noise profile. I then apply a noise reduction effect to the entire recording. This commonly produces a somewhat distorted sound (like if spoken into a can), but the voice of the speaker comes across nicely. After that, I usually apply a compressor effect to balance the loud and quite parts better. I’ve noticed that speakers often start out with a loud voice, and then softens the voice during the talk. For such cases, the compressor helps. It also helps balancing the sound level during Q&A where the audience might be quite or loud compared to the speaker depending on the layout of the venue.
Once the video and audio are cut and filtered, we need some intro and exit screens. I create these using LibreOfficeImpress. I have created a template for the title page with the title of the talk and the name of the speaker, followed by a slide with room for the sponsor logo. This has a white background as logos mix badly with the crazy yellow colour of foss-gbg. Finally there is an exit slide which just says foss-gbg.se. I then export the slides to pdf and use ImageMagick to create pngs from them. Since I’m lazy, I just produce huge pngs that I mogrify to the right size. The entire flow looks like this:
The very last step of the process is to overlap the intro and exit screens with the start and end of the video in a good way. I mix this with fading the audio in and out. The trickiest is fading in, as it is nice to hear the first words of the speaker but you don’t want the noise from the audience. I’ve found that no matter what, you need to fade in the sound, even if the fade only lasts for a fraction of a second. Fading out is easy as things usually ends in an applause.
Then it is all about clicking render, remembering to change the name of the output file and uploading to the foss-gbg YouTube channel.
TL;DR; Tickets including food are sold until April 9 – get yours now!
Organizing a conference means going through multiple stages. The first parts are the most difficult – signing up for a venue, looking for the initial speakers, finding the initial sponsors. Basically, building something out of nothing. This becomes easier over the years, and this, the third year, it has been quite fun. However, since the aim is to grow the event, we always need more sponsors, more speakers and a bigger venue.
The good thing about this year is that foss-north has passed a point where we can finally afford a venue that we can grow in: Chalmers Conference Centre. This is ideally located in central Gothenburg at the Chalmers campus where we find a lot of engineering students.
From a speaker stand-point, the call for papers also passed some sort of pivoting point, and the contents was almost tripple of what we got last year. This triggered us to move to a multi-day event, opening up half the Sunday (April 22) as well as filling the Monday (April 23) – the schedule looks great. I have a tip to other organizers – don’t go multi-day on a hunch after the event has been announced. It means dedicating a couple of weeks to puzzling. Finding a way to affort the extended venue, having to do ask all speakers which day they can attend, and generally complicating things.
Also, I was in kodsnack – a local podcast – which meant that I got approached by Chalmers Robotförening who wants to do a workshop. Of course we will do a workshop! Meaning more planning.
One of the things that is causing more concern when organizing conferences is the catering. Catering is great because everyone can eat together and we get a great mingle opportunity and so on. However, catering needs to be preordered and one thing I’ve learned is that people like ordering tickets late. Like, the hours before the event late. I’ve been up at 5 in the morning printing visitors badges as people like ordering tickets late.
That means that either I have to jepardize the budget by preordering food for more guests that we have sold tickets to, or risking being short on food. However, this is where the new venue is great, because there are three restaurants in the same building. Thus, the tickets sold this week (until April 9) includes catering, but the tickets after do not. This means missing out on the breakfast, mingle lunch and coffee break – but it means that no-one will starve during the event.
So, if you want to take part in *all* the fun, make sure to get your ticket this week. If you can’t make your mind up – there is a solution all the way until midnight before the event.
This is the last day left of the Call for Papers for foss-north 2018. With the help of our great sponsors we have the opportunity to transport you to our conference if you are selected to speak. Make sure to make your submission before March 11 and you are in the race.
Why should you talk at foss-north?
You get to tell the world about something you are passionate about!
You get to visit Gothenburg, Sweden – we can even pay for your trip!
You get to speak to the best audience we can get!
You get to meet loads of nice people!
You get to attend the speaker’s dinner, meeting many interesting people!
I really want you to!
Don’t spend time pondering on why you should not talk at foss-north – instead – submit your talk proposal today!
Every year we try to seed the foss-north event with a set of key speakers. This year, one of our seed speakers is Steven Goldfarb from the ATLAS project at CERN. He will take us on a journey from the vastness of the universe, to the tiniest particles we can observe – all possible through collaboration.
“On 4 July 2017, one billion people – a large portion of our planet’s population – took time out of their day to watch a one-and-a-half-hour scientific seminar featuring plots, graphs, Greek letters, and comic sans. Why? A deep-rooted survival instinct told these people that the discovery by CERN scientists of a fundamental component of our universe was something worth paying attention to. Or they were just news junkies. But, they were right.
Today, at CERN, and other physics laboratories around the world, we are seeking answers to the most fundamental questions of humankind: What are we made of? Where did we come from? Where are we going? What are the rules behind all this? Although we might never find the answers, the pursuit of them provides us with the knowledge and skills our children need to survive. I discuss current puzzles in particle physics and cosmology, then challenge us to keep opening our research (data, source, results) to take advantage of our culturally rich, diverse population.”
It is just 1 more days left of the Call for Papers. With the help of our great sponsors we have the opportunity to transport you to our conference if you are selected to speak. Make sure to make your submission before March 11 and you are in the race.
Some people likes to talk at conferences, other dread it. At foss-north, we welcome both new and experienced speakers and work hard to make the experience pleasant to all. We are looking for contents on a wide variety of subjects. Here are some topic ideas to encourage you to submit a talk proposal:
Teach us your favorite tool.
Talk about your pet project.
Talk about your favourite programming language.
Talk about the friends you’ve made through FOSS.
Talk about a piece of software that you are missing.
Talk about how you organize your work around FOSS.
Talk about why FOSS helps you create your product or delivery your service.
Talk about software licenses.
Talk about software patents.
Talk about how you use FOSS at your school.
Talk about your own FOSS conference.
Talk about anything that you want!
Of course we want your talk to be about free and open source – that is what foss in foss-north stands for.
foss-north strives to gather the best speakers, the best audience at the best location (Gothenburg) for one day each year. This year the event takes place on April 23 – get your tickets here!
It is just 2 more days left of the Call for Papers. With the help of our great sponsors we have the opportunity to transport you to our conference if you are selected to speak. Make sure to make your submission before March 11 and you are in the race.
