Going to Akademy!

Here in beautiful Deventer, in the Netherlands, with Boud and Irina Rempt, the first leg of the journey to Akademy is done. The plane ride as always was dreadful, however the train from Amsterdam through the countryside was nearly silent, fast, and beautiful. I'm recovering from jetlag, eating great salads, wonderful cheese, drinking good beer, and most important, chatting up Irina and Boud, and watching the birds play on the nieghboring roofs. The church in the next block rings the hours, and during the day, some small tunes at the quarter-hour. We walk to the grocery and out to a local restaurant yesterday:

Thank you to the Ubuntu Community for funding my travel here and home!

SeaGL's Call for Presentations open through August 6th

SeaGL is a grassroots technical conference, in Seattle, dedicated to spreading awareness and knowledge about the GNU/Linux community and free/libre/open-source software/hardware. We welcome speakers of all backgrounds and levels of experience – even if you’ve never spoken at a technical conference.

http://seagl.org/news/2017/06/19/CFP-open.html

This year's conference is on Oct 6 & 7 and will take place at Seattle Central College.

The Innovators by Walter Isaacson

I just want to mention The Innovators by Walter Isaacson. I loved that "How a group of hackers, geniuses, and geeks created the digital revolution" began with Babbage and Lady Lovelace.

We're familiar with many of the people and projects Isaacson discusses, but there were many people of whom I knew nothing. Vannevar Bush, for instance, and his prophetic essay, As We May Think in July 1945.

What I appreciated most was the focus on collaboration. Time after time "lone geniuses" labored alone, and saw their work die with them. The work that lasts is done by teams of people who both inspire and perhaps annoy one another, but manage to bring their skills and  best selves to the group effort.

A good read.

PS: A day later, I'd like to add that we need better STEAM education from preschool through college, for boys and girls. Science Technology Engineering Arts Mathematics for all.

Late posting: Heading to Brno for Akademy!

So excited to be in the air over Seattle, heading toward Vienna and Brno, and Akademy! Beside me is Scarlett Clark, who will be attending her first Akademy, and first Kubuntu meeting. We've both been sponsored by Ubuntu for the costs of travel; thank you! Scarlett was telling me, as we waited to board our first flight, how long she looked for a place to contribute to a Linux community. She said she tried for years, in many distributions, on mail lists and in IRC. What she was told was "do something." How does a first-time contributor know what is needed, where to ask, and how to make that crucial first step?

I was glad to hear that once she found the KDE-doc-english mail list, that she was encouraged to stick around, get onto IRC, and guided every step of the way. I was also happy to hear that Yuri, Sune and Jonathan Riddell all made her feel welcome, and showed her where to find the information she needed to make her contributions high quality. When Scarlett showed up in #kubuntu-devel offering to learn to package, I was over the moon with happiness. I really love to see more women involved in free and open source, and especially in KDE and Kubuntu, my Linux home.

I was a bit sad that the Debian community was not welcoming to her, with Sune the one bright spot. Yeah SUNE! (By the way, hire him!) I think she will find a nice home there as well, however, if our plans to do some common packaging between Kubuntu and Debian works out in the future. It was interesting to see the blog by the developers of systemd discussing the same issue we've been considering; the waste of time packaging the same applications and other stuff over and over again. So much wasted work, when we could really be using our time more productively. Rather than working harder, let's work smarter! Check out their blog for their take on the issue: http://0pointer.net/blog/revisiting-how-we-put-together-linux-systems.html

Welcome to Scarlett, who is planning to get her blog up and running again, and on the planets. She'll be saying more about these subjects in the future. Scarlett, and all you other first-time Akademy attendees, a hearty hug of greeting. Have a wonderful time! See me in person for a real hug!

PS: I couldn't post this until now, Sunday morning. The Debian folks here, especially Pinotree have been great! I look forward to our meeting with them on Thursday morning.