Jure Cuhalev » conferences

WebCampLjubljana Autumn 2011

Jure Cuhalev — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 20:30:08 +0000

Last weekend we finished latest addition to WebCampLjubljana series with another sold out event and with 160+ in attendance. We’ve had more than 20 talks and finished the day with a short series of lightning talks.

For this event I tried not enforcing any specific language of the talks, which in the end meant that we had most of the talks in Slovenian and Croatian and a few in English.

We’ve also switched to all digital cameras this time around and so we could release a nice archive of videos in just a week after the event: http://video.webcamp.si. There’s a surprising amount of work required to get such archive online.

Finishing off with a few pictures from Peter’s gallery and I hope to see you at the future events.

Rebooting the community

Jure Cuhalev — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 18:50:58 +0000

This year Kiberpipa will be 10+ years old and its’ event lineup is incredible. Over 350 events a year involving various talks, meetups, screening and everything. During this time a bunch of new technologies showed and demand for jobs as well as our interest shifted and I/we stared creating bigger and more exclusive events (as in: you can only attend if you speak).

It mostly worked, with limited success. What happens is that while the core members Kiberpipa and related communities are used to speaking and working out in the open, not everyone is. And we didn’t give new members of community a chance to slowly build up their involvement.

With this in mind, I’m hoping that we can get a few more meetups and events going where minimum level of involvement is a 15-min talk instead of a full 45-min lecture with all eyes on you.

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MobileCamp:Android – Ljubljana

Jure Cuhalev — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 21:34:04 +0000

If you’ve somehow missed it, we’re doing a MobileCamp targeted towards people who are involved with android (dev’s, marketers, etc.) – on 5th of March in Ljubljana. Do join us.

DjangoCampLjubljana – the day after

Jure Cuhalev — Sun, 12 Dec 2010 18:06:45 +0000

DjangoCampLjubljana was more of a micro-barcamp compared to 100+ attendees that we did before. It was also the first camp where more people showed up then signed up for tickets. So from initial 12 we ended up with about 16 participants. This turned out to be about the best size for such a group, so that everyone could hear everyone without having to use the microphone and we could have open discussion that mixed with presentations.

As for communication channel, we used EtherPad server and it worked great. There’s chat windows as well as collective note-taking editor that we used extensively. I can fully recommend setting-up dedicated EtherPad documents for each session track.

What did I personally learn from the conference?

Gunicorn is great for serving Django and I should learn it
Jinja2 is a great template engine, but is not compatible with Django’s
Django Forms are a big and complex topics that could do with better documentation.
If I ever need to build ajax projects – Dajax can help me
Django-history and Django-reversion can help with time based revisions of models.
AppEngine doesn’t solve any of my problems, but introduces many new ones.

Probably most important: Django community in Slovenia is growing and that everyone should join Django-slo mailing list to further participate.

Django cleaned_data

H5C3 meetup

Jure Cuhalev — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 12:51:41 +0000

Klemen has done excellent job organizing Slovenian HTML5 and CSS3 meetup that’s going to happen on 29th of October in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

You should attend if you’re into these kind of technologies

We’ve built the network: now where do we get the content?

Jure Cuhalev — Sat, 15 May 2010 17:54:35 +0000

Wireless Community Weekend 2010 at Berlin is a conference of different wireless networks around Europe. One of the sessions we held was on what kind of services people are running on their networks and what should be develop (as a community) next to enrich our infrastructure.

We’ve built the network: what now?

Services

radio and video streaming http://rund.freifunk.net or http://www.livestream.com/dubnighttv/
Voice over IP http://wiki.ninux.org/Elenco_Telefonico_rete_VoIP_di_ninux.org
Public web Cams (over the roofs, bird nest’s – very popular in Berlin)

Discovery

Splash screen:

They don’t really work in most experience. People don’t read them or respond to them.
Intercepts connections and makes a bad experience
Problems when being on dual stack
If you have it: don’t mention money as people will go away (even if just for donations). Explain what will happen after they press the login button.
Use SSID as name that you want to announce (use WWW so people know it’s a website)

mDNS:

Service discovery, networks
Music sharing services (iTunes like sharing (DAAP))
Serverless chat
Good resource: http://wiki.ninux.org/ZeroconfServices

Kiberpipa.net is running:

Video streaming from Cyberpipe (lectures – http://video.kiberpipa.org)
VPN for end users
Local irc server with SSL suport (irc.sioff.net)
VPS to run and learn about Linux (all the servers are accessible inside network + ipv6 only connectivity from the outside world)
Multiple-storages (NAS) for sharing stuff/run your own FTP server
Peering connectivity to other Freifunk networks/hackerspaces

Other services that people are running

Used books
Weather report
Blog server
Radio streaming
DNS servers that do all the fancy remapping (service to all the users)

Wishlist:

WE NEED working SPLASH SCREENS
nodes running their own webserver
automatic name registration system (web site)
alternative domain names redirection (custom zones)
internet caching services (uncensored)
decentralized community radio station / shared radio schedule (gsoc project this year): http://radiomate.org and http://fusoradio.net
game servers (freeciv works!)
mesh-partys (like lan party)
local search engines
good service discovery service. What is the most common way to announce new service around the whole network: mDNS?

Want to share your experience in running services on your wireless networks? Share it in the comments.

MobileCamp Ljubljana in late March!

Jure Cuhalev — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 10:03:57 +0000

Who needs to sleep when you’re having so much with the BarCamp like events, right? Building upon this idea we’ve announcing MobileCamp Ljubljana, that’s going to take place on 27th of March 2010 at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering.

I’m excited about this MobileCamp for two main reasons: we’ll be bringing local mobile phone developers together for the first time in such numbers. This is important for Slovenian Mobile scene as there many indie iPhone and Android developers that need to see that their peers are active in the industry and that they’re not alone.

The second is that this venue is much bigger in terms of space so we should be able to introduce more people to concept of unconferences as well prepare grounds for a series of smaller MobileCamps later in the year if there will be enough demand.

We’re seeing increasing demand for iPhone and Android developers from companies and entrepreneurs as well as demands for applications from users, so lets expand this market fast and catch-up with the rest of the Europe. This time we’re switching back to English as primary language and we’re hoping to attract broader community also from the neighboring countries.

As always, go to http://www.mobilecamp.si for all the gory details and how to sign-up for your spot at the MobileCamp.

RealTime WebCamp reflections

Jure Cuhalev — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 11:42:39 +0000

We can say once again that our last event, RealTime WebCampLjubljana, was a great success. We didn’t run out of coffee, there was enough electricity and WiFi as well as a great mix of people and the quality of talks and discussions was astonishing.

There are a few things that we did differently this time that had effect on the ‘camp feeling:

Smaller group – instead of going with 150+ we went for 50+ crowd. More intimate and it allowed for more open discussions.
Two tracks only – moved from 3 tracks format to 2 tracks as there was less people and we also had to optimize for the available rooms. We still managed to create a nice balance of tech vs. non-tech oriented talks.
Slovenian language – despite protests from our friends in Croatia, we decided to go with Slovenian as a primary language this time. My current feeling is that this made it easier for everyone involved and we should consider sticking to Slovenian for smaller camps that are not intended for international audience.
‘Hackish venue’ – instead of going for university or conference venue, we crashed in Hekovnik this time, a new hackerspace in Ljubljana. This had a totally different feeling of more ‘ad-hoc’ and less sterile environment. It seemed like people enjoyed this more.

There is still a question – how to encourage people to prepare more sessions and how to time the event. Going for early Saturday morning as a start (8am-ish) seems to work great for now. Regarding more sessions, I’m not sure if we can expect more than 30% of attendees to run their own session, would be interested in recommendations on any literature on the topic of facilitating sessions.

Did I miss anything important that we should take into consideration for our next ‘camps?

Announcing RealTime WebCampLjubljana

Jure Cuhalev — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 19:01:50 +0000

It’s been two months after last WebCamp and it’s time for another party. Following the idea of BarCamps with story line, we’ve decided to organize RealTime Social WebCamp Ljubljana.

This time we’ve decided to focus on a single emerging technology space: Real-Time Social Web. If you’re not up-to date with the latest buzzwords, it’s about next generation RSS protocols like HubSubPubBub, RSSCloud, XMPP (that powers GTalk), Synaptic Web, Twitter API and a bunch of other technologies and ways of thinking about the Web and Mobile space.

Intended audience are developers and people who are close to them (e.g. interface designers, product managers, etc.) and will need to innovate in this space in the next 6 months.

We’re doing it a bit more limited this time, just 50 spaces. I’m interested in seeing how a smaller and more focused group changes the dynamics of such gathering.

The rules for the tickets are the same as the last time. Send description of your talk early and you get a ticket, or hope that you can click fast enough for the left-over tickets later. I believe that extra effort should be awarded.

The official language this time is Slovenian since we’ve figured out that locals that are not native speakers understand our geek talk enough that it shouldn’t be a problem and we can understand them as they lecture in their own language.

As always: all the details are at http://www.webcamp.si

Monitor and Display: an image of the Ghost in the Machine – #Ljudmila #digitaldish

Jure Cuhalev — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 21:15:01 +0000

These are my notes from the talk by Nedine Kachornnamsong – Monitor and Display: an image of the Ghost in the Machine.

Copenhagen Airport project, In Place-Spective, 2005-2006

Airports are transitional spaces without special meaning to people – it’s a non-place. So how can we construct a place inside an airport?
So what’s a sense of place? It’s hard to share and compare your sense of place with each other. Architectural approach might not be the best way to do it.
Sense of place doesn’t have to be attached to a physical space. It’s more of a virtual construct based on social interaction.
The problem: you don’t want to socialize, because you’re in the transit; your’ve very vulnerable and you care only about your travels.

Posters inside washrooms, that you can use to share things with each other. The posters were placed inside toilet doors.

The Ghost in the machine is used to criticize the idea of dualism by Descartes. Dualism – the body is just a vehicle of the mind. By having a belief that body is a slave the mind, it’s the same as saying that we’re just a ghost in the machine.
It’s about how you define the humanity – separation of human and being, human vs. animal. Animals are locked into instincts while humans are of free will.
Animal is the machine, while human is the ghost in the machine; meaning that we’re ghost of the animal.

The Living Machine

Our best machines are made of sunshine; they are all light and clean because they are nothing but signals, electromagnetic waves, a section of a spectrum.
— Haraway, Donna. “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s.” The Haraway Reader. 1985. Ed. Haraway, Donna. New York: Routledge, 2004. 7-45.

This new machine becomes a problem because it comes very close to the concept of humanity. So we need to redefine what it means to be a human.

Yes/No/Maybe

Pyshical event that takes elements from the online dating site:

Anonymity
Degree of interest
Object of desire (something that you can interact with)

Look for it in near future in Ljubljana.

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