RMLL 2011

As described in my first post, after the first panic at RMLL, everything went like clockwork. I am amazed how well the conference went – lots of talks, lots of people and WIFI worked throughout without any hiccups. That is a first, as you very well know – a meeting of geeks with all kinds of gadgets is very difficult to cater for. Not only did the conference run well but the atmosphere was extremely friendly and of course it happened in a very beautiful town – Strasbourg which has a large university only 15 minutes walk from the town centre with its beautiful old houses and of course the cathedral… but I did not see any storks – sad.

My table was set in the “Village des Associations”. Over 60 stands represented most of the User Groups in France – from Debian to Perl, to Ruby but also with “a computer per child” stand and much more. The stand representatives were extremely friendly and very informal.

As previously mentioned, Richard Stallman made an appearance at the Village.

I also met some very interesting people – I first met Bjarni Runar Einarsson founder of PageKite at Codebits last year. PageKite brings your localhost servers on-line – PageKite is the software that gives your localhost servers names and makes them globally visible. It works with any computer and any Internet connection. It’s so easy you’ll never want to think about routers, IP addresses or other technicalities again. It’s open source, too!

My main contact with the organization team is Remy Sabatier of Diskcard.fr. Apart from creating a great conference, Remy will always be the man who keeps his credit cards or other important pieces of paper in his socks. When not organizing conferences or stuffing his socks, Remy founded Diskcard.fr, a data recovering company mainly for individuals who are put off by the cost and attitude of large companies. What I find excellent is the pricing method -I have never thought it was possible. First you send your disk, pc or whatever to Remy who assess the problem and then send you the bio etc. You then decide if you want the job done and how much you would like to pay. It gives you the opportunity to judge the value of your data as well as recognizing the value of the job to be done. All this of course is under the free software movement.

I also met a representative of the Maison des savoirs of Kinshasa. La maison des savoirs is organized by the International Organization of Francophonie (OIF) – This project aims to meet the needs of disadvantaged youth and provides multi-service and multi-media access to knowledge in an educational and cultural perspective. Hopefully I will have more to say in the not too distant future.

RMLL would not be complete without the web radio. All day long we get interviews, music, snippets of information – podcasts are available.

What is RMLL? Allegedly les rencontres mondiales du logiciel libre – I think les rencontres francophones du logiciel libre would be  more truthful. It has lots of different tracks treating a variety of topics including –

• Health, accessbility and handicap
• Libre cultures and arts
• Law
• Communities
• Local authorities, administration and public policies
• Sciences, research, education and popular education
• Corporate, business and FLOSS

and of course

• System Administration
• Development
• Embedded systems and open hardware
• Operating systems
• Security
• Internet

When the real thing is not available, you have to put up with an ersatz!