Christopher Allan Webber

Week of LibrePlanet a busy one

Christopher Allan Webber at

It was a really busy week. I'd like to extrapolate on what happened more on my blog, but here's a short summary:

  • Took Gerald Sussman up on his offer, dropped by his office again to chat about all sorts of things (more thoughts out of this, will lead into some future work / writing)
  • Ran a 2nd annual "Free as in Root Beer" informal gathering
  • W3C standards meeting, and all the conflicting arguments of how to do things in the group are sort of resolved! They said it couldn't be done! I think we have a coherent path forward for federation and client to server API standards in the group where everyone agrees and knows how to coordinate it.
  • Also Jessica Tallon demonstrated MediaGoblin and Pump.io federating together at the W3C SocialWG face to face meeting.
  • Contributor Experience hackfest at SpinachCon
  • Hung out with a bunch of friends
  • Dropped by the MIT Press bookstore and picked up the original 1960s "Lisp 1.5 Programmer's Manual" and a book on genetic algorithms
  • Spoke at LibrePlanet w/ @David Thompson on "Solving the Deployment Crisis with GNU Guix"
  • Met up with Minifree and ThinkPenguin libre hardware distributors and talked
  • Talked to the http://ring.cx people about how we can work together
  • Spoke and marched in a rally/protest against DRM then attended a roundtable afterwards
  • Discussed my thoughts about "free software in the age of generative programs" with a number of people and have a good sense of an article to write on the subject.

Lots more too! Maybe I'll be able to write some follow-ups to all that.

PS: Seeing the FSF get up Snowden's talk on their MediaGoblin instance made me feel really good about the work we're doing!

PPS: Some people have asked where the "copyheart" source file I made for Conservancy is, called out in Karen's talk: here's a PNG and an SVG. CC BY-SA 4.0! (Also credit @Bassam Kurdali who did most of the SVG path work from my sketch)

wakest, Tyng-Ruey Chuang, bthall, Claes Wallin (韋嘉誠) and 8 others likes this.

Claes Wallin (韋嘉誠), GNU MediaGoblin shared this.

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"Contributor Experience hackfest"

Sounds like an amazing idea.

"Gerald Sussman"

So jealous.

Claes Wallin (韋嘉誠) at 2016-03-23T08:52:48Z

Who are "we" here?
Talked to the http://ring.cx people about how we can work together

Claes Wallin (韋嘉誠) at 2016-03-23T08:53:28Z

"we" is Jessica Tallon and I talked to the Ring folks about how we could possibly collaborate or learn from each other. They're doing some interesting things, and there's certainly overlap in ideas, if not many technical choices.

Dave also tried packaging Ring for Guix but it looks like it will be hard... they've done a lot of problematic bundling.

Christopher Allan Webber at 2016-03-23T13:41:11Z

Ok, so I guess that's from the Mediagoblin perspective. Is it the distributed identity and discovery stuff that you have an interest in?

This ties nicely with the months-old Manu Sporny post we commented on yesterday. :-)

Claes Wallin (韋嘉誠) at 2016-03-24T08:19:19Z