Libre hosters conf 2020

we use croodle occasionally, specifically this instance : https://www.systemli.org/poll/
can’t say if it’s better than framadate, just mentioning it as an alternative… :slight_smile:

as for specific dates, november-december is too far in the future for us, personally i could post availability a few weeks before scheduled dates, not earlier… so, i just put unavailable dates, i already know i couldn’t attend.
also with corona still around, i don’t know how a local meet would go ahead… even without planes…

I do not think a distributed LH event would gather more people locally than any previous gathering we’ve made so far. If such restrictions were to happen by the end of the year, I would probably take it to the streets and throw rocks at the fascist militia enforcing them.

you really shouldn’t wait for corona to throw rocks at any fascist militia :wink:

just sayin that there are 2 sides in this…
capitalist side, wanting things(=money) to move around even if we all have to “drink chlorine”, and those who just want to be free to go out… i’m ok with the 2nd option, just don’t trust capitalists to do the right thing…
and there are doctors (friends of mine), telling me that corona is still around and has never left… i tend to trust them more that any boss/militia/internet hoax.

Why do you think I refer to some hoax? I have my own brains and can think for myself thank you. I do not trust the capitalists to do the right thing either, because they’ve been showing for over 500 years than they do not respect life, and the phase we’re in is especially violent and repressive; so surely there’s not as many (accounted for) deaths as before from wars, but in the meantime, it’s still forbidden to assemble in the streets in France (talk about fascism) while movie theaters reopened. One day after another, the Constitutional Council is breaking down the laws that made it through the “global threat” of COVID-19. It’s interesting to see how the fall of USSR left a hole that was filled in by global terrorism, and when it became too apparent that terrorists kill less than peanuts, another invisible enemy inherited the semantics of war, which, I repeat, concern States – there’s no war without States, if you believe the Rule of Law.

And to me, the “capitalist side” is not “wanting things”: desire is not capitalist ; capitalism is extracting value everywhere, it should be called not an economic regime but a chrematistic regime – a regime of accumulation – which shares more with COVID-19 or Cancer than with salivating in front of an ice cream or moving around. Capitalism is an enemy of life, it acts like a virus, colonizing its host, maybe giving it the impression it grows, to suck its blood in the end ; and capitalism is only one aspect of patriarchy and colonization.

To decolonize the Internet, I probably want to decolonize my body first, and enjoy my antibodies while I can, since I feel part of the antibodies to capitalism. So surely, your doctor friends are right, but I don’t think global confinement and the virtualization of the economy further into the hands of global digital corporations and the banks is going to help go through this or the next sanitary crisis.

And if you really do not want to have any contact with other humans, you can as well help coordinate the offline meetings online :slight_smile:

Dear @network ,
We have 3 participations on this poll for a meeting end of this year.
Does that mean nobody cares about meeting ? Or you all wait for the others to fill in their dates first ?

1 Like

Neither options: I have no view on November yet.

I don’t plan generally, so I just come if I can and remember in time to make the necessary arrangements.

1 Like

I don’t feel like putting any effort in this any more.
Eventually I’ll show up at a chat meeting if I can remember in time…

I still think the original proposal to hold distributed meetings in person and coordinate online is the perfect format.

I didn’t mean to offend your efforts or demotivate you in general, I just wanted to clarify why I can’t fill in some poll with so many dates. Also, you shouldn’t feel solely responsible for this event imo.

We might at some point get enough anima to organise the first chaos treff in Brussels, so perhaps just fix a date and we might do some combo. Or combine it with https://no.camp

1 Like

Dear friends,

first of all apologies for the late post on my side. I should have posted this much earlier, but couldn’t due to many things going on.
As I mentioned during one of the previous meetings the idea of a fest came after the involvement with Open Publishing Fest and from a spontaneous call with @pierreozoux from Indie.host. Here is the proposed description and some other technicalities from my side based on discussions and some of my & my colleagues proposals:

Conference name: Libre Hosters Festival 2020
Proposed dates: three days in total Thirsday Friday, Saturday in November. With a team preference for 5, 6 & 7 November 2020.
Languages: any language that one feels appropriate or/and comfortable. The more the merrier :slight_smile:
Website: festival.libreho.st
Tagline: celebrating ethical data hosting & net decentralisation

Description
In this moment of history, where the big tech is doing more harm than ever, we gather together at LHF to share our knowledge and build bridges between us to fight back. Libre Hosters Festival celebrates the development of a network of cooperation and solidarity that uses free software to encourage decentralization through federation and distributed platforms. During the festival days we will share our values: transparency, fairness and privacy with a culture of data portability and public contributions to the commons. Most important, we will get to know each other, celebrate and make sure to enjoy these days of togetherness and meet with old and new friends just like in a ‘real life’ festival!

Expected participants:

  • Libre Hosters of any kind (individuals, small teams, coops, companies);
  • organisations, small teams and individuals that want to find an easy way to move away from big tech;
  • community members and contributors behind free libre open source software.
  • digital rights freedom fighters.

Where
there are many travel restrictions in place and it seems like it will be like this for quite some time. Having said this, online seems like the best way to go. Presentations and workshops can be hosted to a platform of choice of each presenter as long as FLOSS infrastructure is used. On my/our experience BigBlueButton and Jitsy seem to have worked, but if someone feels like using something else it’s more than ok.

How
The festival can be organized in the most decentralized way possible, so everyone should feel free to propose a talk, workshop or a… DJ set featuring Creative Commons music :slight_smile:

Thematics
Presentations can be around federation, green energy hosting, floss infrastructure providers and more (we need to define the thematic areas maybe?). _Participants should just be creative with the proposals and as long as it is related to the principles of Libre Hosters Network (https://libreho.st/) should be more than welcome to submit a proposal at the dedicated forum category https://talk.libreho.st/ created only for the festival.

Website and communication
We can use the same website structure as Open Publishing Fest (https://openpublishingfest.org/), but feel free to propose any others tructure you think would make sense.

CoC
Last but not least, usually such events have a CoC, which I would propose to have.

What do you think?

R.S

4 Likes

@agnes I just voted at the poll. Thanks for creating it BTW.

R.S

Thank you for fleshing out the proposal. I like it a lot, except for a couple of mentions:

As mentioned elsewhere, we prefer the term “free software” to any other alternative, to make a point about freedom.

I think the emphasis is too much on the individual where it could mention as well informal collectives and non-profits since members are organizations:

On other notes:

  1. I would be happy that @agnez’s original proposal to coordinate local events be maintained and put forward. As Petites Singularités, we have proposed /run to Resist Uniform Normality, and this would be an excellent example
  2. A dedicated category in #events can be started (e.g., #events:festival)
  3. For the website, I like the proposal: the blog could reflect the dedicated category and calendar

Thank you @nino for the heads up!

Something else: since this would be a mostly online event, I don’t think we need to restrict how many “talks” are given, etc. Actually we should think instead of a different format of presentation, e.g., collaborative writing of documentation, shared screen sessions to setup services, and shared distributed task lists to hack on during the festival, etc.


Additional notes from Petites Singularités

As discussed previously for the OFFDEM manifesto[1], the original proposal of this topic was to organize

After discussing with @natacha, we realize the following:

  1. There are few or no travel restrictions in Europe at this time
  2. There are no travel or assembly restrictions locally
  3. Online tools exist all the time, and we can use them without requiring a special event
  4. Online events are usually sub-optimal to convey a sense of community except on the long term thanks to continuity and in-person gatherings

Therefore, we would like to insist on the original proposal and first point above and avoid an “online event” that would deny these facts and fall for the systemic paranoid creep that is instrumentalized by governments and global corporations at the expense of social life and the more fragile alternatives.


  1. Do we need such large events , OFFDEM vouches for decentralization, as most people only have one life and can achieve a limited number of projects, we do not need to be all at the same time at the place, let’s organize and promote smaller and more focused meetings on different topics aiming at practical achievements for the communities they support.

    ↩︎

Thanks for the comments @how. I agree with what is proposed. My only concern is to define the date(s) the soonest possible. For how long do you think we should wait before taking a decision?

R.S

Usually, setting dates for an event is a matter of making the decision. If there’s no outstanding event that other Librehosters would attend at your chosen dates, it’s fine to just carve it in stone and get started. Another option would be to make it run over a full week so that smaller events have more space to choose from and join the gig.

As for myself, I am fine with the proposed dates, and I am checking with P.S.: members to confirm.

Small correction: there ARE travel restrictions in Europe. I live in Albania (a country in Europe) and can’t travel almost anywhere at this moment. Same applies for citizens of Serbia, North Macedonia, Montenegro and Kosovo which happen to have strict travel restrictions. For Kosovo citizens I know for a fact that even without a pandemic it is quite hard end expensive for them to travel. Is this fair? No, not at all. Would it be wise to fight against it? Maybe yes, but until than I’d like to meet my friends from the Libre Hosters network and people interested in what we do in a way that is possible and feasible at this moment, not when the govs decide to change their opinion. Capitalism is another fight - growing or connecting with each other is another challenge. Let’s not mix those.

Again, where I live there are strict assembly restrictions and the same applies for people in many European countries I mentioned above.
There are quite some people from Tirana that would participate at a Libre Hosters event, but the only way to do it is virtually/online at this point. It would be unfair for these people not to participate, know and interact with you and the community.

That is true, but since for one reason or another (travel costs for people outside the usual central European countries where all the events happen unfortunately, which maintain a privilege in accessing these events + the fact that officially there is a pandemic) the proposal for this event was to be online.

In my opinion and experience in building communities, dedicated events tend to incentivize people outside of the usual suspects to join. You can invite your friends to enjoy a coffee/beer/tea at your place one by one or all together. The social feeling you get in each case is different. It’s the same in this case, we can invite people sporadically or have a lot of people during specific days. We are doing the first option in the forum and in monthly meetings, why not try for once to gather in a couple of days more people as well?

I finding it hard to follow you here - maybe it is just my poor understanding of the English language. It’s just an online event with people that given the circumstances can know each other better online, meet new people that have similar interests outside the usual bubble. This does not avoid in-person gatherings. Me and my friends had a call with one of the members here the other day and had a blast. It would be impossible given the costs involved to do the same meeting by traveling from Tirana to the city of my new friend from Libre Hosters. Is it better to do an online meeting in comparison to a virtual one? Yes, of course. Can we do it at this stage given the circumstances? I don’t think so.

R.S

1 Like

I cannot see how you cannot mix those in the current conditions where capitalism is imposing different rules to different people according to their status within the capitalist world…

Interestingly, these are countries that do not produce heavily spending tourists by Western European standards. Can you see a pattern here?

This is exactly one reason why OFFDEM promotes distributed local events, to get rid of this prominently Western European or U.S. centrality of large events. Instead, organizing smaller, local events and coordinating them globally using the Internet seems a lot fairer. One of the interesting side effects is that people with less visibility, e.g., a local Albanian hacker, can participate because they already have the recognition of their local community, and do not need to compete with “world class stars” to appear on the global event. Same goes with languages: you can have local events in a local language for your local audience, and eventually translate for a global audience (which does not necessarily mean ‘English’, BTW – it’s a lingua franca here in the network, but I would expect Arabic hosters to be happy with providing contents in their own ‘global’ language).

I don’t see a difference: our online meetings are mostly attended by people who know each other in the flesh, and there’s no exclusion involved with gathering people and relaying their conversations or labor online – which we always do with Librehosters gatherings (we use “meeting” for online events, and “gathering” for meetings in the flesh, but both types of meetings are relayed online).

The proposal is to organize local gatherings, and to coordinate online: do you see this as a problem with regard to the announcement you wrote? I did not get your last paragraph: the proposal is neither to travel anywhere nor not to meet online. Did I manage to clarify the original proposal?

My proposal was to have a decentralized event with the only ‘conditions’ being:

  • all the activities (on & off line) to be reflected on an online calendar so that everyone knows when happens what and can plan a bit ahead;
  • having a name for the event so that we all refer to the same thing and dates when things will happen and people plan a bit in advance before;
  • all activities are ‘on topic’, which could be the same topics with the ones we talk here at the libre hosters community/network.

These were the initial thoughts principles and if we agree on those we could build up on the details of the event.

R.S

Sounds like /run but I don’t know how you relate to what I posted above.