Bancroft avenue, soon to be LGM Central.

In the spirit of states of (LGM 2015 will include sessions on both the state of libre graphics and the state of color management), we bring you the state of Toronto weather. April in Toronto is a tricky month. It might rain, it might be beautifully warm and sunny. Today, some heartening news: we’ve had a week of warm, sunny weather and, though trees aren’t in leaf yet, spring is making its presence felt.

Brussels-based design collective Open Source Publishing will lead two workshops from the 27th to 29th of April. Using Visual Culture, a git-based tool for collaborative design, OSP will convene workshops around the themes “Portrait of a (digital) community” and “What happens in Canada stays in Canada (for the next twenty years).”

Learn more about the workshops (and other off-track events) on our Off-Track Events page, and register for the workshops through Eventbrite.

Volunteers are welcome! If you care about improving FOSS typography or just want to help write documentation, please join us.  You can contact Nathan Willis (nwillis@glyphography.com) or write to the HarfBuzz mailing list (https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/harfbuzz/).

For each project we want a title slide and one, none, or two content slides. The title slides should/could contain name of project, logo and perhaps a brief tag-line for/description of the project. The content slides should be about changes in the last year; as well as perhaps plans for the near future, it is good if the slides are a mostly visual; with speaker notes with context for what to to say with the slides.

Naming of files:

projectname-0.png (or .jpg)
projectname-1.png
projectname-2.png
projectname.txt

The graphics files should be 1024×768 – if they are not; they will be resized to fit. Feel free to bundle the files all in a tarball or zipfile, and send them as an attachment to pippin@gimp.org in an email with ‘State of Libre Graphics’ as part of the subject.

For projects focused on video/animation; an up to 100second video/animation with audio would be welcome instead of slides 1 and 2. If this option is taken, upload the video somewhere and provide an URL for fetching it.

Content should be submitted by Wednesday the 22nd of April, a week before LGM.

For three days before LGM 2015, Inkscape developers will be getting together, face-to-face, in Toronto. The Inkscape Hackfest provides an opportunity for developers who normally collaborate online to get together, talk, and solve problems.

As they put it, “Being together in one room also allows us to work on things that are harder to do on-line: designing a new plugin/extension system, teaming up to squash particularly nasty bugs, authoring better user documentation, and planning where to take Inkscape development in the future.”

More details about the Hackfest are available on the Inkscape website, and dates and locations will be published here as they’re available. The Inkscape Hackfest is one of several off-track events taking place around LGM 2015.

Every year, donations from supporters make it possible for LGM to subsidize the travel costs of participants. 2015 will be no different. Today, we’re launching our annual campaign to raise funds which will go towards reimbursing travel costs for attendees who contribute to the event (whether in the form of a talk, participation in the project, or offering a workshop), but who can’t necessarily pay for travel costs on their own.

In the coming weeks, the program for LGM 2015 will start taking shape. Donations to the fundraising campaign will help ensure that exciting workshops can be given, talks can be presented, old collaborations can be continued, and new ones can be started.

If giving a talk, running a workshop or organizing a Birds of a Feather or hack session sounds like your idea of a good time, take a look at our call, and consider submitting something. The deadline for submissions is the 1st of February, 2015.