Support the Libre Graphics Meeting 2009

[MC707]

This is a meeting to support travel and collaboration between Free and Open Source Graphics Software Developers and Users to Montreal, Canada this May 6, 7, 8 and 9.. I won't explain everything, as this press release says everything. I feel some artists here at VS will feel like helping Maybe you can visit them too, loki!

The Libre Graphics Meeting (LGM) is an annual workshop for developers and users of free software graphics applications to collaborate and advance the cause of high-quality free graphics software. From now until April 22, you can help support this event by making a donation to the LGM 2009 community pledge drive. LGM is free to attend, so your support is critical to making this important event a success.

The fourth annual LGM will be held May 6 – 9, 2009 in Montreal, Canada at École Polytechnique. Donations will be used solely to help cover travel costs for volunteer developers and presenters. Last year’s campaign raised more than $12,000 dollars from individuals and corporations in the community.

As with last year, pledges can be made online at Pledgie.com. Visit http://pledgie.com/campaigns/2926 to make your contribution. All donations are tax deductible for US taxpayers. Large donations from corporations and individuals may go through the Pledgie campaign or contact LGM directly at lgm@gnome.org in order to coordinate.

About Libre Graphics Meeting

For four years, the Libre Graphics Meeting has been the premiere conference for developers, users and supporters of free software graphics applications. Developers from projects such as GIMP, Inkscape, Blender, Krita, Scribus, Hugin, the Open Clipart Library, and the Open Font Library gather to work on interoperability, shared standards, and new ideas. Work at prior LGMs has pushed the state of the art in important areas such as color management, cross-application sharing of brushes and other assets, and common formats.

The face-to-face meetings and opportunities for collaboration are important to developers, but LGM offers plenty for end users as well. Tutorials, talks, and birds-of-a-feather (BOF) meetings to help free software users get the most out of their applications fill out the LGM schedule, and demonstrations from artists showcase what is possible.

For more information, visit http://www.libregraphicsmeeting.org/

For the Pledgie campaign, visit http://pledgie.com/campaigns/2926

LGM is super critical for all of the aforementioned projects to get together and have time to talk face to face. Most of us live all around the world and only get to chat electronically. Meeting face to face synergizes all teams. Even more, through presentations and talks, new overlap happens which brings new collaboration.

If you benefit from Free Software-based Graphics tools, please consider providing a donation to the LGM Fundraising Campaign so that we can all keep making this software great for you!

[loki1950]

Must make sure that chuck_starchaser sees this he is a montrealer my attendance is problematic for work related reasons i would have to pay any replacement worker out of my own pocket just the way the contract is.

Enjoy the Choice

[MC707]

Must make sure that chuck_starchaser sees this he is a montrealer my attendance is problematic for work related reasons i would have to pay any replacement worker out of my own pocket just the way the contract is.

Too bad you can't go. Hopefully chuck will visit this event, as well as give us some insight of what goes on at the Meeting Gonna PM him just in case he slips my thread.

[loki1950]

I posted the press release to WCJunction so he will see it as a new post

Enjoy the Choice

[MC707]

Nice. Thanks for supporting!

[chuck_starchaser]

I will most definitely attend. I pledge I'll make a donation to it too; but not right now; maybe April.
Many thanks for the heads-up.

[MC707]

Thanks, chuck! Tell us about the meeting after you visit it!

[chuck_starchaser]

Gee! Starts at 8:00 am!
http://events.linkedin.com/Libre-Graphi ... /pub/67379
There must be a mistake; nothing starts at 8:00 am in Montreal.
I can't promise I'll be there, due to a minor health problem that's become major lately,
but I'll try.

[chuck_starchaser]

Took me about 1/2 hour to find the building of Ecole Polytechnique. The LGM website didn't specify
what room, or even what floor was the meeting happening at. The information kiosks' people had
no idea. I was sent so many places back and forth (literally), up and downstairs repeatedly, that
I finally sat on a bench ehausted, dejected, and ready to head back home. Then, one of the many
people I had asked for directions was passing by and asked me if I found the place; I said "no, and
I've given up", so he offered to get to the bottom of the mystery and find the place for me, and so
I followed him, and ended up in the main building, 6th floor.

So, got there by lunch-time. There were, I'd say, about 200 people, sitting in little groups around tables,
lots of laptops everywhere. I asked if there were any Blender-heads around and found one, a developer
no less; got into a chat; asked me if I had any ideas how to improve Blender... I had brought a notebook
with me (paper) and a pen, so I told him I'd get back to him, and started writing down ideas for features
and fixes. About an hour later I gave him 4 pages worth of itemized ideas. He took a quick look and
liked what he saw. He also mentioned that in a future Blender version there might no longer be any
limit to the number of material indexes (they are currently limited to 16). We exchanged emails and
then it turned out he was theeth, of blenderartists.org fame.

Starting about 2:30 in the afternoon there were several presentations, but my mind is a blank now...
Well, one presentation was about the experience of writing a book about Scribus in Scribus.
Another presentation was about Scribus itself.

Ah, yes, there was a presentation about Color Management, sRGB and whatnot; good one. I asked if
color management wasn't a problem of output devices, such as printers and screens, and whether it
would not be the responsibility of device makers to provide the means to calibrate their devices.
Reason I asked this is that it seemed to me that the presenters advocated that all applications should
support new color management standards. The guy said that in Linux X11 has no means to do color
management. Later I asked whether it shouldn't be a matter of forking X11, but he said that the X11
developers had looked at this questioned deeply and concluded it shouldn't be X11's responsibility.
After the lecture, I was talking with one of the guys in that color management movement and I sort
of injected the thought that color management as presented is sort of half-complete; that to be full
color management it must deal with input devices such as cameras; that there need to be color
reference tablets like the ones aboard the Spirit and Opportunity, with which camera images can be
calibrated; that there need to be material libraries specifying exact material colors.

There was an interesting but inscrutable presentation about something called a WebOS; after about
20 minutes I had to interrupt the speaker... I said "I'm not sure if I'm the only one here that's totally
lost (several people laughed) but I don't know if you're talking about hardware, software, a business
or a political movement", so he stopped the presentation and played a movie.
At the end of the movie I was still pretty much in the dark; so he tried to explain it in basic terms:
Some applications, such as wikis, Inkscape and others have cooperative editing features. I think
Blender does have a cooperative interface, too, by the way; though I never used it. Seems that this
project is about creating server-side and other standards to make cooperative work the rule, rather
than the exception. He mentioned many times something called WebDAV, which allows saving,
moving and renaming files in a cooperative environment; and this would be one of the elements in
the proposed WebOS. I did manage to write down a url for further info; but haven't looked at it yet
myself:
http://basiscraft.com

I'll try to be there again tomorrow, but no promises.

[loki1950]

Wrapping ones head around WebOs proposals can indeed cause one to reach for the tylenol bottle but Cloud computing is the current buzz word and hyper tech movement with the emphasise on the hype
Glad you made a blender connection now show him cinemut or at least some links.
And some of the Xorg devs seem to have there heads where the sun don't shine
Have fun if you get there tomorrow as the real purpose of these conferences is face to face interaction so meet the people lad

Enjoy the Choice:)