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Deb Nicholson is a free software policy nerd and passionate community advocate. She is the Community Outreach Director for the Open Invention Network, the largest patent non-aggression community in history which serves Linux, GNU, Android and other key FOSS projects. She’s won the O’Reilly Open Source Award, one of the most recognized awards in the FOSS world, for her work on GNU MediaGoblin and OpenHatch. She is a founding organizer of the Seattle GNU/Linux Conference, an annual event dedicated to surfacing new voices and welcoming new people to the free software community. She also serves on the Software Freedom Conservancy's Evaluation Committee, which acts as a curator of new member projects. She lives with her husband and her lucky black cat in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Matthew Garrett is a security developer who's spent time working in the cloud, on the kernel, around accessibility software and surrounded by fruitflies. He currently works for Google, but (unless otherwise stated) certainly doesn't speak for them.

Many of us are here because we're part of at least one online community. Many of us have made lifelong friends, found jobs, travelled the world and had experiences we could never have imagined, all as a result of collaborative online projects bringing us together - participating in communities has grown our lives and brought us joy and success.

And others have had the opposite experience. Membership of online communities has brought them stress and unhappiness or targeted them for abuse. People have been attacked for their sex, race, sexuality or neuroatypicality. People's professional lives have been ruined, and in some cases also their personal lives. Communities are not always welcoming.

Online communities have existed for decades, but we're still only now coming to terms with building ones that help without hurting. What's the difference between communities that foster collaboration and communities that create conflict? What have we learned through that history? And in a world that's basically on fire, is there any hope of doing better in future?

Karen Sandler is the executive director of the Software Freedom Conservancy, former executive director of the GNOME Foundation, an attorney, and former general counsel of the Software Freedom Law Center.

Currently the Debian Project Leader, Chris is freelance computer programmer, author of dozens of free projects, and contributor to 100s of others. Chris has been an official Debian Developer since 2008 and is currently highly active in the Reproducible Builds project for which he has been awarded a grant from the Linux Foundation's Core Infrastructure Initiative. In his spare time he is an avid classical musician, reader and Ironman triathlete. Chris has spoken at numerous conferences, including LinuxCon China, HKOSCon, linux.conf.au, DjangoCon Europe, OSCAL, multiple DebConf's, Software Freedom Kosovo, foss-north & FOSS'ASIA.

If you develop or distribute software of any kind you are vulnerable to whole new categories of attack including blackmail, extortion or simple malware injection... even if all you distribute is the source code.

By going after software developers, malicious actors can attack and infect thousands — if not millions — of end-users.

However, the motivation behind "reproducible" builds is to allow verification that no flaws have been introduced during compilation processes. This prevents against the installation of backdoor introducing malware on developers' machines as well ensuring any attempts at blackmail are pointless or futile.

Through a story of three different developers, this talk will focus on this growing threat to developers and how it affects everyone involved in the production lifecycle of software development… as well as how reproducible builds can help prevent against it. It will also mention some of the cool tools that have come out of the Reproducible Builds development.

John Sullivan has been with the FSF since 2003 (and freenode before that), becoming its Executive Director in 2011. He is deeply involved in every area of its work, including outreach and advocacy, licensing education and enforcement, development and infrastructure, and business operations. He holds an MFA in Writing and Poetics, and a BA in Philosophy. He has spoken at and keynoted events regularly since 2004, including the Libre Software World Meeting, Open World Forum, Salon du Logiciel Libre, LibrePlanet, and OSCON.

GNU and Linux are now embedded in more kinds of hardware than ever, but nearly always only by requiring proprietary bits. The world's most popular tablets and phones are based on a free core system loaded with nonfree software on top. We are at risk of free software being used primarily as a delivery vehicle to lower the cost of getting proprietary products to market.

How do we get the freedom we all want, and what is the market for that? The Free Software Foundation has a certification program called "Respects Your Freedom" (RYF) that awards a certification mark to hardware meeting a set of free software standards (fsf.org/ryf).

RYF has already made significant gains, especially over the last few years, certifying USB wifi adapters, 3D printers, home wifi routers, and earlier generation laptops. A growing number of small companies are competing on the basis of the certification, and crowdfunding campaigns are citing meeting the standards as a key project goal.

Even bigger things are planned. Get updates on what's in store, learn what it takes to get your product certified, hear about the impact of certification so far and the community that has formed around the program, and discuss possible improvements to the standards.

Can we turn our current "free software under the hood" reality into a reality where people can go into a store or shop online and find clearly marked products that fully respect their freedom?

A long term contributor to Free Software, Neil McGovern has held posts at Software in the Public Interest, Open Rights Group and served a term as the Debian Project Leader. Neil currently works as the Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation.

One of the amazing things about the GNOME project is how it brings people together, both by bringing new developers into free software for the first time, and by fostering cooperation and interoperability between different Free Software components. The "year of the Free Software desktop" may not be in the next twelve months, but for those that use GNOME, we can work together to ensure that software freedoms are accessible by all. This talk will have a look at some of the challenges that GNOME faces at the moment, a brief look into the future, and how we can meet those head on and thrive.

Myles Jackman is an English lawyer specialising in defending cases related to pornography, he is the Legal Director of the Open Rights Group

The passing of the Digital Economy Act 2017 means that porn websites will need to verify that their UK visitors are over 18. Websites that fail to do so may be blocked by Internet Service Providers.

It is still not clear how this badly thought-out legislation can be implemented without putting the privacy and security of UK citizens at risk. Some of the proposals could leave people vulnerable to credit card fraud, blackmail or an Ashley Madison style hack.

Our free speech is threatened too - the blocking powers could set a precedent for censoring legal content on a massive scale.

The UK's leading obscenity lawyer and Legal Director of the Open Rights Group, Myles Jackman, will explain how this latest law is part of an ongoing attempt by the Government to 'control' the Internet, and how it puts our liberty and freedom at risk.

FC is a well-known ethical hacker and social engineer. He has been working in the infosec field for over 20 years and excels at circumventing access controls. He has held positions in his career such as Senior Penetration Tester as well as Head of Social Engineering and Physical Assessments for renowned penetration companies. As Head of Cyber Research for Raytheon Missile Systems, and having worked closely alongside intelligence agencies, he has cemented both his skillset and knowledge as well as helped steer governments take correct courses of action against national threats.

As an ethical hacker and social engineer, FC ‘breaks into’ hundreds of banks, offices and government facilities in the UK and Europe. His work demonstrating weaknesses in physical, personnel and digital controls assists organisations to improve their security. He is motivated by a drive to make individuals, organisations and countries more secure and betterable to defend themselves from malicious attack.

Now Co-Founder and Head of Ethical Hacking at Redacted Firm, he continues to perform valuable research into vulnerabilities. His client list involves major high-street banks in the UK and Europe, FTSE100 companies and multiple government agencies and security forces.

FC frequently gives talks at corporate events, security conferences, universities and schools and focuses on teaching people of all ages the art of security in an engaging and impactful way. He co-founded the Surrey and Hampshire Hackspace as well as Defcon 441452. He has co-hosted many podcasts, been featured in the press and regularly writes articles for journals and blogs.

Christopher is passionate about software and computers, and is involved with robotics, GIS (geographic information systems), databases, package managers, web applications and more.

Guix provides a way to describe packages, services and systems, then make those descriptions a reality, with a methodology inspired, and often compared to functional programming.

This approach brings with it enormous expressiveness and reliability, allowing you to avoid common problems.

We will discuss the history behind Guix, how it builds on the foundations of the Nix package manager.

We will cover what Guix can offer you, how you can use it for reproducible and reliable systems.

Finally, we will discuss how you can get involved.

Mooneer works as a software engineer at a medical device company on the west coast of the US. Prior to (and alongside) this role he has had significant experience in the open source community, working on various different open source projects, including several that he has personally started. Current development projects include newsrdr (a web-based RSS reader similar to the old Google Reader), arduino-ntpd and a Google map tracking chip enabled merchants in the US.

Free and open-source software has had a huge impact on software development and computing overall. Many thousands of projects have been created by numerous people for a variety of reasons. However, this variety makes it difficult to figure out what to work on next. To the person just starting out in open-source, it's almost as it seems like everything's already been solved.

In this talk, I'll talk about how I was able to use things in my life--most seemingly unrelated to open source--to create brand new projects and contribute to existing ones. I'll also give ideas on where one can look for inspiration when determining what to work on next. At the end you too will be seeing things that you can improve with the power of open source software and well on your way to making an impact on the community.

James is a software developer and designer, and chairs the IRCv3 working group, an open standards body that publishes widely adopted improvements to the IRC protocol. He also runs IRCCloud, a service he started in 2010 to make it possible to stay connected to IRC from any device, with modern apps and features that make it a pleasure to chat. James sees huge potential for the IRC platform to grow, to support open communities, and to shape the future of collaboration.

Gone are the days when IRC was the only place to engage with open source communities in real time. Now, projects have a gluttony of choice when deciding on a platform to host their community and development chat rooms. But how can we manage the problem where half the community insists on sticking to their painstakingly cludged together command line IRC configurations, and the other half just can't function without emoji reactions? Well, yes, it's more nuanced than that, but can we help bridge the gap by teaching an old protocol new tricks?

This talk will cover the IRCv3 working group's progress on modernising the IRC protocol, and how to use gateways to merge a forked community back together.

Jamie Bennett is VP of IoT and Device Engineering at Canonical, the commercial body behind Ubuntu Linux. At Canonical Jamie helps to deliver Ubuntu Linux to millions of desktops, servers, and IoT devices globally as well as working with software developers to bring great software to Linux.

Prior to joining Canonical Jamie spent 10 years as a Software Developer in the Games and Entertainment industry before holding leadership positions at ARM, Linaro, and Trustonic. He currently resides in Bath, UK, is a vegan, runner, and keen researcher in the fields of Smart Environments, Smart Healthcare, and Sustainable Food Production. He holds a BSc in Computer Science from the University of Bradford and a MSc in Software Engineering from De Montfort University.

Oliver has a background in computer networks and is a senior IT manager at a major weather forecasting centre in the UK. For over 20 years he's worked with software as a hobby and contributed to open source, mainly in Perl, and now leads the Netdisco project.

Netdisco is an open source web-based application for computer network management, written in Perl and hosted at https://metacpan.org/pod/App::Netdisco and https://github.com/netdisco

It began life around 15 years ago in a large US university, and is now a well-known package globally within the network community, with a strong development team in Europe.

We’ll cover briefly the history of Netdisco, the original authors’ approach to open source, and deciding to do a major rewrite after 10 years. Then move on to how we’ve been successful, or not, in different ways over the years. I will describe how we support Netdisco (GitHub, SourceForge, freenode!), especially the challenges with an international open source project used by a diverse group of very large and very small organisations.

You might like this session if you run a small open source project and want to hear how others manage their projects and strive for success in a pseudonymous, collaborative, global space.

SpyderMix is intended to provide an internet scale service that makes it impossible to block, restrict or shape internet traffic selectively, essentially providing unrestricted internet access for everyone, especially those that need it the most in repressive regimes.

Stuart Herbert is an industry veteran, and the one common thread throughout his career has been Free and Open Software. Whether he's been contributing to it (dialog, ncurses, Generic NQS, Gentoo Linux, hubflow and more), using it across academia, enterprises, startups and government, or talking about it (PHP, software and systems architecture), FOSS has been part of what he does every day for almost 25 years now.

How do you go about writing a talk? How do you go about learning to write a talk? What are the skills involved? What's the process from taking an urge to say something all the way through to giving the talk to an audience? What happens afterwards? I've been writing and delivering talks since 1996. Some are public presentations like the talk today, but most are private - whether an in-house pitch, pre-sales, or delivering training. And recently I was asked - how do you do it? So that's what I'm going to share. I'm going to take you through the process of writing a talk. More specifically, I'm going to take you through my process. I'll show you how I go about it, and all the things I'm considering when crafting a talk. I'll share 3 specific things that you can go away and do to help you craft your own talks. And, hopefully, I'll give you the confidence that you can do this too.

Kaspar is a freelance electronic engineer and software developer working on projects ranging from musical instruments to robots to Braille displays. His primary professional interest is in making technology more accessible, less scary and more fun. Kaspar also spends a lot of time on developing free and open source software for making electronics designs and tools to make the designs themselves easier to share.

Kitnic.it is an open source site for sharing open source hardware electronics projects. A Kitnic page is a kit in virtual form: it makes the ordering of parts required to replicate a project as easy as possible. This talk will cover why and how Kitnic was created and how you too can make use of it.

Nilesh is a Technical Support Engineer for RedHat's Openstack team.

In this talk, We will talk about Openstack-Manila as a Filesystem and will take a deep look into Manila as a Filesystem with NFS.

Originally conceived as an extension to the Block Storage service (Cinder), but emerged as an official, independent project in the Grizzly release.

Manila is typically deployed in conjunction with other OpenStack services (e.g. Compute, Object Storage, Image, etc) as part of a larger, more comprehensive cloud infrastructure.

Matthew Miller, Fedora Project Leader, gives a brief overview of the Fedora Project, including current top objectives. Then, let's all talk about what Fedora can best bring to this kind of open source / free software conference — if you're curious about Fedora, what do you want to hear, and if you're already a Fedora enthusiast, what can you tell others?

Matthew will also answer general questions about anything Fedora-related, and will put Peter Robinson on the spot on the topic of Internet of Things. We also have several Raspberry Pi 3 start kits running Fedora — and one of them could be yours!

Maxigas is a Science and Technology Studies scholar who wrote his dissertation on the peer production of open hardware in hackerspaces. Now he is into the Luddite Aspects of Hackerdom, and part of that research is The Social History and Contemporary Use of Internet Relay Chat. He is a Fellow in Budapest, a post-doctoral researcher in Barcelona, and a Lecturer in Critical Digital Media Practice in Lancaster. He is based in Calafou, the Eco-Industrial, Post-Capitalist Colony.

This talk is an attempt to take a long durée view of challenges to IRC in the context of the changing technology landscape and its political economy, with a conclusion that addresses the burning questions of the day: the widespread adoption of Slack on one hand; innovation in decentralised technologies on the other hand, as well as the acquisition of freenode.

IRC manifests a basic human desire to chat, hang out and collaborate in an informal manner. However, these activities have not always been valued too high by managers and gatekeepers of IP networks. At other times, they have been perceived as the potential basis for lucrative business models. Therefore, IRC communities and operators met various challenges through the history of the technology, ranging from outright ban to corporate takeover. Social conflicts unfolded in close interaction with industry actors, where sometimes users even reclaimed resources from employers. However, the very meaning and consequences of peer directed projects also shifted with the reorganisation of production during the recent decades of late capitalism.

Nonetheless, the story of IRC is an outstanding example of the self-organisation and self-management of users, showing how norms of organising and managing infrastructures prevalent in the early days of the Internet could persist through increasingly hostile historical circumstances.

Douglas DeMaio is a spokesperson, public relations expert, and community and event coordinator for the openSUSE project.

Matt S Trout was thrust into Perl at the tender age of seventeen by a backup accident. Two weeks later he realised that he was in love with the language and has been happily using it for systems automation, network, web and database development ever since.

He is co-maintainer of the Catalyst web framework (and co-author of The Definitive Guide to Catalyst), the creator of the DBIx::Class ORM, and a core team member for the Moose metaprotocol and object system, as well as contributing to assorted other CPAN projects.

Matt spends his days leading the technical team at Shadowcat Systems Limited, an open source consultancy specialising in Catalyst, Perl applications deployment and systems architecture. Shadowcat sponsors web, source repository and mailing list hosting for Catalyst, DBIx::Class and a large number of associated projects, and creates and releases open source code both internally and on behalf of its clients.

If you haven't been paying attention to javascript (and I can entirely understand why you might prefer not to), things have changed quite amazingly over the last few years.

Ok, they got 'use strict' years ago - but now they've added 'let', which is proper scoping, anonymous function declaration syntax that won't give you RSI, a class keyword, and more.

Plus annotations now let you make all sorts of trouble, and the tooling to transpile to Olde JS is mostly comprehensible and no longer replaced by something completely different every two weeks.

So, clearly, the only sensible thing to do was to try and write ES6 in the same OO-heavy style I write perl5, and see how far I managed to get.

Come to this talk and you'll find out.

Perl developer at FairFX in London

There's different ways people like to install perl dependencies. In general, there's certain things you always want to be able to do though: you want to be able to easily install them with a simple command, keep dependencies separate for different projects (and not just install everything in the home directory), and make sure you 'pin' dependencies to certain versions so you don't end up performing an accidental update that breaks your app if you've been naughty and not keeping up to date with new dependencies all the time. This talk introduces Carton, which gives you the ability to easily do all that.

Nathan Handler (nhandler) has been a member of the freenode staff team since 2009. He is an active member of the open source community where he is an Ubuntu and Debian GNU/Linux Developer. When he is not contributing to open source projects, he works as a Site Reliability Engineer at Yelp.

freenode has nearly 100,000 active daily users and over 50,000 channels. However, only a small team made up of a couple dozen volunteers gets to see all of the work taking place behind the scenes to keep the network running smoothly. In this talk, Nathan Handler (nhandler) will share some details about the common (and not so common) tasks that staff perform. He will also discuss how staff and their work have evolved over the the years. Finally, he will share some of the goals freenode has for the future and ways that you and your projects can help freenode meet those goals.

Michael Schloh von Bennewitz is a computer scientist specializing in network engineering, mobile design, and telecom server development. Responsible for research, development, and maintenance of packages in several community software repositories, he actively contributes to the Opensource development community. A prolific speaker in four fluent languages, Michael presents at technical meetings every year. He teaches security workshops on Internet of Things and Embedded Computing technology, travelling with a mobile laboratory of over 300 sensors, actuators, and computer devices. Michael's IoT knowledge profits from years of work at telecoms and relationships with industry leaders. He is a Intel innovator, Samsung partner, and Mozilla committer with the mandate to promote IoT technology.

In this hands on workshop, we use Opensource friendly vendors' developer kit hardware to piece together a mini IoT Empire. The hardware is made available for the duration of the workshop and may include nRF-51DK, FRDM-KL25Z, Raspberry Pi, Beaglebone Black, Minnowboard, Tessel2 or similiar devices.

This workshop is a beginner level for enthusiasts of many languages including Python, JavaScript, C/C++, Go, and more.

Development environments

Self paced participants can choose from a variety of Opensource portable frameworks and development environments such as:

PlatformIO
Arduino IDE
Cloud9 IDE
NodeJS
ARM Mbed
...or an unportable one of their choice

Step by step instruction will likely be given using ARM Mbed or PlatformIO.

IoT Empire appearances

The IoT Empire series of training is delivered at events throughout the world, most recently selling out a full class at Black Hat in Las Vegas. For more information, please review the wiki at: https://edu-europalab.rhcloud.com

Requirements

Please bring a portable computer (any kind) with two or more free USB ports. Optionally bring a smartphone or embedded device of your own, like Chip, Omega, LoPy, and other similar IoT relevant devices not in our inventory.

Philipp is part of the infrastructure team and a Developer Advocate at Elastic, spreading the love and knowledge of full-text search, analytics, and real-time data. He is a frequent speaker at conferences and meetups about all things search & analytics, databases, cloud computing, and devops.

New systems are always interesting targets since their security model couldn’t mature yet. NoSQL databases are no exception and had some lurid articles about their security, but how does their protection actually look like? We will take a look at three widely used systems and their unique approaches:

• MongoDB: Widely criticized for publicly accessible databases and a common victim of ransomware. Actually, it provides an elaborate authentication and authorization system, which we will cover from a historic perspective and put an emphasis on the current state.
• Redis: Security through obscurity or how you can rename commands. And it features a unique tradeoff for binding to publicly accessible interfaces.
• Elasticsearch: Groovy scripting has been a constant headache, but the new, custom-built scripting language Painless tries to take the pain away literally.

Owner of Snoonet, an IRC network designed for Reddit communities. IRC advocate since the late 90s. Currently Projects Director for London Trust Media, INC. President of HackerSpring.com (an LTM subsidiary).

From newborn to adulthood: how the maturation of self mirrors the evolution of community

In this talk I am going to be expressing some observations, matched to a few social theories, these observations are about the Perl community but also refer to other technical communities and the broader social fabric.

I will discuss how I see the evolution of the community as a mirror to the development stages of the individuals who are its members. To do this I have used simple analogies. Broadly this is an examination of community as a societal construct and a familial evolution, how much is contained within the confines of the other and how communities exist in these paradigms.

These are my own, initial, observations and thoughts and are part of an evaluation of the Perl community and my interaction in other technical communites and are generally useful to those of us who look sideways at the interactions of the technical worlds we exist within.

At the end of it I want to give you 5 things you should have learned.

Michael partakes in functional programming $FUNKY_NOUN, is a Ph.D student, and community admin/moderator.

You've found a project you like, and want to be more involved than just a user, great! But how do you get started? Implementing an entire new feature or solving a real bug can be pretty tricky for someone new to the project, so here are four simple things you can do to improve just about anything: improve the documentation, run static checkers, test it, and and improve the performance. This talk is mostly aimed at beginner contributors, but will hopefully have something for maintainers too.

Jelle van der Waa is an Arch Linux Developer and has been active in Arch Linux for over 8 years as bug wrangler, irc op, Trusted User and recently as Developer.

In the last 15 years, Arch Linux has grown from a one man project to one of the most popular Linux distributions. In contrast to most other successful open source projects, it has no commercial backing, no governing body and no formal rules. It is not particularly user friendly, welcoming to newcomers or easy to learn. So where does Arch's success come from? In this talk, we look inside Arch Linux. We show how platforms like the Arch Wiki and the AUR built a strong community of competent Linux users that makes Arch unique and keeps it alive.

Christel has been an avid advocate, user and contributor to FOSS projects since the mid-90s. She has previously been involved with Gentoo Linux, Exherbo Linux, Irssi and ReactOS and co-founded the Surrey and Hampshire hackspace. She is currently the Head of freenode, and the Director of Sponsorships and Events at Private Internet Access. She sits on the GNOME Advisory Board and is a member of the ISOC Advisory Council.

She will be delivering a privacy workshop together with Rick Falkvinge.