The last Sunday of the month at Foulab is reserved for the Free Software Workshops, known as Les Ateliers du Libre (APL).

This 28th of February, from 1pm to 5pm, we also host a presentation/training by Yannick Delbecque on LATEX – a document preparation system and a standard for the communication and publication of scientific documents.

In the meantime, there will always be time and place for Free Software and GNU/Linux installations, exchange and technical assistance for the ones who need help. Professionals and amateurs, everyone is invited! Bring a friend :)

LinuxCNC it the "home of users of the Enhanced Machine Controller - EMC". There's everything about the EMC there - definitions, howtos, configurations, helps. There's this wonderful users manual (PDF) which I am reading now, and has all the vital information for understanding how the EMC works. Here are some first interesting points that I noted, but if you want to know (much) more, read the whole manual.

The Enhanced Machine Controller (EMC2) can control machine tools, robots, or other automated devices. It can control servo motors, stepper motors, relays, and other devices related to machine tools.

The LibrePlanet Conference will be held March 19th-21st in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the Harvard University Science Center.

Why you should attend:

• Learn about the latest developments with the GNU operating system
• Workshops, presentations and lightning talks from key free software projects
• Participate in group hacking projects or campaign discussions -- bring your laptop
• Learn about practical steps in free software advocacy.

This year Libre Planet will also be hosting a GNU Hackers Meeting and a track focused on finding ways to increase women's participation in free software.

She's Geeky: A Technology Conference for Women will be taking place between 29 and 31 January, 2010 in Mountain View, California (US). Held in the Computer History Museum, She's Geeky promises to be an awsome event.

Among the proposed sessions can be found many interesting ideas: from technical skills, to management and transfer of knowledge, networking and philosophy around women and technology, children and computers, and the future.

Here are my favourites mixes:

• Linux, command-line, GIMP, programming, public speaking
• Ruby programming, Rails, ways to get more women into programming, teaching programming to kids
• Arduino!

Je fait une intervention au cours de Sylvie Jochems, TRS 2150 « Analyse des mouvements sociaux et action collective en travail social ».

Falling in love is an out of control feeling. Sometimes, you fall in love with an incompatible one. With the one you cannot be if you reasonably think of. Sometimes this one can be defective by design. But love is blind.

You guessed it. I fell in love with an iPhone. Smart, quick, portable, interactive, connected iPhone. What wouldn't be the feeling of being connected everywhere, at any time, at any moment. To have all your gadgets into one: camera, music, recorder, files, e-mail, twitter, browser, book, encyclopedia, notebook, and many more. No more heavy laptops, no fear of battery lose, of internet stop, electricity failure. No more server emergencies, no more connecting from the near-by parking. Going to the countryside will be a different experience. No offline moments, no cutting yourself from civilisation.

OK, so what is the price for all that? First of all, it IS expensive. The lowest price is 200$ + 75$/month for 3 years. The guarantee, however, of this thin and yet fragile gadget is 1 year. So, even if it breaks after 1 year and 1 month (this is Apple, after all!), you still pay the 75$ for 3 years. This makes a total of 3000$ in the end.

What about privacy? No way! First of all, I am profiting of the fact I live without a mobile phone. My appointments are fixed, and I live in piece. I disconnect Friday to reconnect Monday morning. No matter what I do, I need this privacy myself. Disconnecting from Internet, does not stop me from working hard in the weekends, which I still have not managed to fight.

What about compatibility with my system (GNU/Linux)? Freedom of formats, of content... Forget about it. Not even iTunes under Linux. And something even more - they can connect to my phone at any time, and if I am doing something "illegal", they will find out. So, no hacking please! This machine might be expensive and pretty, but will remain "a black box" for its users.

I am changing these days. My mind is changing, and my thoughts - with it. I think it is my MA thesis which is changing me. Each day I discover new things around women's contribution to FOSS development, which is sometimes difficult to explain, but is tempting to make it heard by more people. This is why preparing a speech is a birth of a new challenge. It cannot be done months before it is given. And instead of doing my slides in the plane, I kept working on my research. Because the more I advance into the issue, the more what I will talk about will be new. And the more it is new, the more it is passionate. And by presenting it to other people, will make me advance with the research.

Every hacker conference confirms things, and opens up for some new thoughts. My point of view seems rare, since I am into three things at the same time: I do hacktivism, I do feminism, and I do research on these both things. Well, going to hack conferences is the rarest of the conference topics I actually do. More often I get the chance to go to academics ones, where I need to define what is FOSS, what is “women” and what is “contribution”. Then to ones on women rights and feminism (need to introduce information and communication technologies through FOSS). As for me, the hacktivism ones are my favourite ones. These really touch to so many issues I do not get the chance to hear about elsewhere then at the presentations.

My first presentation at FSCONS, taking place tomorrow from 15h15 has this crypted title "NGO Women". It is part of the Serengeti track on social movement examples on Free Software appropriation.

So, in brief, I am going to give several examples on how feminist movements around the world use free software as their approach to software and Internet technology: ways of appropriation, challenges, strategies. Some of the projects took place in Eastern Europe like the Women's Information Technologies Transfer, a network of ICT trainers for the women's movements, which bases its principles on open platform and freedom of technology. Others are taken from France, Canada and other parts of the world.

I will also like to discuss a statement, which I hear more and more often on feminist forums, that "There is nothing more feminist on the Internet than the Free Software". This is in similarity to another, more global view that Free Software movements and solidarity movements, in general, often have a common agenda.

Here I am in Göteborg. For a whole hour! Very very nice on the first sight. Will write more (with photos) a bit later.

As for the FSCONS, I am looking forward to it! There are so many interesting presentations to come: hacktivism, youth, democracy, public administration, societies building, women's practice on technology, the copyleft hardware, open content and open source economy.

I am one of the lucky participants, who will also be given the podium twice in order to share my experience and research subjects. I am looking forward to this rather geeky, but in its base very social event.

And even if they try to scary us with reasons not to come to FSCONS, I think people not coming will be mostly sad and jealous they wouldn't. I will also try to write an article for the World News section of the Linux Magazine. But first my presentations to pass.

DrupalCamp Montreal 2009 is on now. More than 100 people, presentations in 2 tracks and also some informal ones. This is my third DrupalCamp Montreal (even if on the website is written it is the second one).

The first one was in 2006, and this was my first meet-up with Drupal, and with the community. I must admit, at this time, I did not get much impressed by the software, since I was proud user and contributor to Spip (another cms). But I liked the community though. I met some great women (Myriam, Angie "webchick" and others).. some great people and an easy-going space, where you can join sessions, ask questions and fool around with the software.

DrupalCamp Montreal 2009 is different. It is much more big, more institutionalised (in McGill University), more organised (coffee, lunch, wifi, schedule, registration, t-shirts, book store, video streaming...). I like it because it has somehow kept its informality, and warm welcome for newcomers. I even attended the first day without registering, and it was not problematic. No fierce control, no stopping unregistered participants, things are voluntary and grass-root raisen, and since this does not stop the community to participate, to pay its fees, to organise in a good way, to have great and high quality participations. Even if companies participated, there was not big visibility of the corporate participants, no logos, no intrusion.

The most interesting for me was : Angie's Keynote about Drupal 7 from the first day and the training and support experience of Caroline and Deb.

I was also at the Gmap-ing and Views by Lis and Jake, but they took about 30 min to start, and then my concentration went away, the site kept crashing, the presentations was slow, full of tech probs.. and I got nothing in the end. People starting laughing and participating in troubleshooting, but not really into contents...

Since I will be teaching Drupal soon, it is a good warming-up excercise for me to get the new software directions and features.

Great work #drupalcampmtl !

As announced on the FSCONS schedule, I will be giving a keynote speech regarding women's contribution to free and open source software.

Here is the preliminary summary of the keynote:

Rethink Women's Contribution to Free Software Development
by Christina Haralanova

Free and Open Source Software development is seen by many as a technical, but also social phenomenon of the past several decades. The FOSS community bases itself on collaborative principles which lead to fast code evolution, a diminishing distance between users and developers, by allowing them to work together in order to produce a high quality code, available to all through a free licence.

Even if the FOSS community values inclusion and cooperation as basic principles, it persists as being rather homogeneous by its social structure. There are many challenges for women to join the FOSS community. Research shows a one per cent participation of women in the FOSS development projects. Even if we don't agree with this rather reductive number, we recognise women represent a minority in FOSS.

We will propose a critical point of view of the free software development processes, and its definition which limits software building to writing code, by excluding other processes such as usability, testing, documentation writing, bug finding and fixing, training end-users etc. Women's contributions relate a lot to these “side processes” related to software development. Therefore, by ignoring them, there is a strong possibility that women's work in FOSS remains invisible.

If software development can be assumed as a complexity of socio-technical processes, this could also be a way to value the work of non-programmers and non-experts in the field, including a large number of women. Such turn into the FOSS paradigm can also make a change in the overall perception that FOSS is too technical, and therefore difficult to use.

So, here are the main issues:

1. As a feminist activist, I am most often confronted to presenting the Free Software paradigm and use by women's rights activists. It is now turning the other way around that I have to present the gender imbalance in the FOSS community. Seems like a really different challenge.
2. Presenting a three years academic work on Women's Contribution to FOSS Development, in 30-35 minutes is another one.
3. Since similar debate is already raised by a number of FOSS conference participants, I think maybe I should present the same problem from a different point of view. In fact, I am tired of hearing the number 1.1% as of women participation in FOSS - I like to argue it is not completely true, and repeating it creates even more stereotypes...

Dear readers, your comments on the topic will be welcome. Dear FSCONS participants - please bring in your suggestions. I will try to take them in consideration.

I saw the principle some years ago, when I worked with a colleague on his computer on a software documentation project. After 45 minutes, his computer would block access to his data, "forcing" him to take a break. Now I see this more and more often; Workrave can even propose you exercise for your hands, body and eyes. Why have we become so undisciplined about our health so that the computer has to remind us we have life outside of the net and work?

Workrave suggests that every 10 min, you close your eyes for 30 seconds, every 45 minutes, you take a 15 minute break. It gives you also a daily limit of your life-on-the-screen.

"Take breaks. Grinding away at a task for hours on end, you'll lose perspective and eyesight. As Lincoln said, if he had to chop down a tree, he'd take breaks to sharpen his ax. I use a free computer program called Workrave (www.workrave.org) to remind me to look away from the screen and walk around every so often. Just knowing that a nap, a vacation, or a meal is on the horizon can make me more productive and not look for excuses to take little breaks all the time."

The Free Society Conference and the Nordic Summit will be taking place this year in Göteborg, Sweden. I was invited by Serengeti community, who wished to make a link between the Free Software movement and the social communities and groups. So each example on how this relation is possible, will be helpful for their workshop. I will speak about how women's movements around the world appropriate Free Software.

I will be also doing a keynote speech on Free Software and Feminism.

The dates:

• November 14, 15h15 for the Free Software and Women Movements track
• November 15, 9h00 for the keynote speech

I am looking very much forward to this event!

If it would be just writing an thesis, it would be too easy. Just in a week time at the country, I managed to write a whole chapter, and read about 600 pages (with notes). And then, I will need about 3 weeks off in order to write a paper for the JoCI, and to make a presentation at a colleague, who is doing for the first time a course in "Computer science and society" at the Technical University. I will need to prepare for a 5 weeks missing from home, a wrap-up for my thesis for the end of August....

Thème : "Faire son blog avec Drupal".
L'heure et le lieu :
le 19 juin à 14 heures dans nos locaux :
6833, avenue de l'Épée
Bureau 308
Montréal

Plan de la formation

1. Introduction
2. Présentation de drupal
3. Planification de projet
4. Information du site
5. Utilisateurs et permissions
6. Activation des modules
7. Activer une langue
8. Blocs
9. Configuration des statistiques