Sunday, 02.06.

Why do some open source projects appear to have difficulties to attract new contributors? Why are some projects „easy to work with“ from a user’s (and new contributor’s) perspective while others seem „complicated“? Why do some projects feel „accessible“ and „welcoming“ to new contributors while others do not? How can projects increase velocity? How can they decrease the time needed for getting from a wishlist item to a proposed implementation, to improvement ideas, to a proven user-tested implementation, to a merged feature, from weeks to hours? Especially application projects that have been in existence for many years can benefit immensely by „catching up“ with contemporary productivity-boosting tools and methods such as devops, continuous integration, and instant user testing. We will be looking at concrete examples involving GitLab and AppImage and Libre Graphics application projects like Inkscape and Scribus.

Simon Peter is the founder and lead developer of the AppImage project, and has been a desktop Linux user since over a decade. He thinks that downloading and using applications on the Linux desktop should be at least as hassle-free as on other desktop operating systems.

https://appimage.org/

Filmulator is a project I made to streamline photo processing on Linux. Existing photo tools are either fairly basic in their capabilities or have a massive number of tools cluttering the user interface, multiple ways to do the same job.

With Filmulator I aimed to replicate the hidden goodness of film without outright mimicking the color and tonality of film. By literally simulating the chemical development of film, we get all the positives of film, with none of the negatives.

Carlo Vaccari

is an engineer who picked up both Linux and photography in high school, and began programming as a hobby during college.

This spring we’ll celebrate 10 years of darktable. over this long period of time, many people have contributed their time and efforts to add great features. but the ever changing group of developers also poses challenges. we’ll give a short historic overview, discuss different approaches of team organisation and share some experiences we made over the years. we’ll conclude with some blue-sky future ideas which hopefully spur a discussion.

Johannes Hanika received his PhD in media informatics from Ulm University in 2011. After that he worked as a researcher for Weta Digital
in Wellington, New Zealand. There he was co-architect of Manuka, Weta Digital’s physically-based spectral renderer. Since 2013 he is located in Germany and works as a post-doctoral fellow at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology with emphasis on light transport simulation, continuing research for Weta Digital part-time. In 2009, Johannes founded the darktable open source project, a workflow tool for raw photography.

Tobias Ellinghaus is a contributor to darktable and a few other open source graphics tools. He also dabbles in photography with varying success. https://www.darktable.org/

During this session we aim to reflect on our experience & research related to the state of design practices in free libre open source communities. It is more than clear today that creative practitioners need to focus more on the lack of attention for UI and UX design in our communities. Even though design itself has drastically changed (for the better?), we can not say the same about design experiences created in collaboration with FLOSS communities. As active contributors to such communities (Mozilla, LibreOffice, phpList and Nextcloud to mention a few) we have identified and will share some of the reasons why this happens in our opinion. In addition, we will share some of the ways every creative practitioner can contribute and get involved in improving the actual status quo in FLOSS. Case studies related to well known open source communities including LibreOffice and phpList that will be shared during the presentation will be combined with a list of small „quick fixes“ we have prepared that will help every floss designer make design in open source communities even better. Hopefully, by the end of this session we will pay more attention to good design, whatever „good“ means for each one of us.

Redon Skikuli has been engaged in free software community building since 2012 at a local and regional level, through Open Labs hackerspace in Tirana, Albania and as a co-organizer of Open Source Conference Albania (OSCAL) until 2018. These days he spends his time developing CityZen FLOSS mobile app and Identihub, the free software visual identity management platform. Since 2018 he serves ad the business development consultant at Collective68 offering his know-how about floss, digital security and open data forcompanies and international organizations.

Kristi Çunga is a graphic, brand and UI designer and FLOSS activist based in Tirana. I started contributing to improve the design in free libre open osurce communities in 2018 while working for the visual identity and creative assets of LibOCon, the yearly community conference about LibreOffice, hosted in Albania. This helped me get involved with free open source communities and also contribute with design mainly as part of my involvement with Collective68, the consultancy offering professional services about FLOSS, open data and online privacy. My works (mainly typographic posters) have been shown in two outdoor exhibitions for young visual artists, in Mineapolis and Nantes.

https://collective68.tech/

In this workshop we’ll create small decorative light objects which can react to external triggers.
The goal is to use a short length of LED strip with individually controlled LED lights. A small microcontroller-board will be programmed to show different light patterns on the LED strip and might be extended in the future to react to network and/or sensor based triggers.
Participants don’t need previous experience. They need to be willing to learn about soldering and programming, some experience in making things is helpful.

Contribution to material costs: 30€/person

Registration per Email to
simon-lgm(a)budig.de

Simon Budig has quite some experience in building colorful light objects, some of which already did attend previous LGMs. Simon is an embedded software developer in Siegen and involved with the GIMP project since 1998.

Blender is a free and open source 3D creation suite. Long gone are the times where 3D professionals looked at it as a tool for hobbyists and geeks only. Its recent success stories (2.8 project, main software in high-profile productions like „The Man in the High Castle“ or „NextGen“, Oscar nominated short films…) have raised attention all over the animation industry.

With all cool stuff people are doing with Blender, there’s also growing interest amongst software developers to get involved – and they are very welcome. However, a huge code base with decades of history is not trival to get into. This workshop aims to give a practical introduction to the development process and the source code. Yes, we’ll definitely write C code.

Julian Eisel – It’s now been five years since I started my involvement in Blender. In that time I contributed houndrets of commits, big projects, had notable impact on the renowned 2.8 project, became co-owner of Blender’s window-management module, became team member of Blender’s UI team, got multiple development grants from the Blender Foundation, successfully participated in Google Summer of Code, …

Although I love the technical side of things, my focus has always been usability. Oh, and besides my Blender work, I’m an informatics bachelor student.

The Character Creator is a free (AGPL) web application (HTML5 + CSS3 + JS + SVG) which enables artists to quickly generate original characters from a series of choices and options. Artists can create, download and modify the images in Inkscape for use in games, comics, websites or any 2D medium.

This talk will show you how I built the Character Creator to streamline my workflow for making comics, how you can clone the project, and adapt it to suit your artistic style. You’ll learn how to create assets with vector graphics in Inkscape, to optimize them for the web, manage them with Javascript, download them to further edit in Inkscape yet again and, finally, to publish them online freely for all to see.

Frédéric Guimont -I am a comic book artist in my free time and a web developer the rest of the time. I have created a comic book adaptation of Orwell „1984“ in 2004 and since then, I have been experimenting with new ways to create comics for the web. I have been working with Free Software since 2004. I have worked as a frontend developper for Savoir-Faire Linux. I have given talks at various conferences (HOPE in NY in 2005, WAQ in Québec in 2017 and GrafikLabor in Rennes in 2016). I am looking to contribute to the Free Software community with code, visual ressources and by developping techniques that enable creators to add visuals to their projects without legal restrictions. I have built the Character Creator from scratch for myself and others to use, and have built a small JS framework to view comics online with a fast and simple navigation.

https://charactercreator.org/

Save time and optimize your workflow with these tips on how to get the most out of working with Live Path Effects (LPE) in Inkscape. Learn the basics during this global overview, including a few tricks to solve common problems. Change elements in a non-destructive way and apply them optionally in a stack.

Jabier Arraiza (@jabiertxof) has been actively involved in developing Inkscape for the past five years. He is the main brain power behind the professional Live Path Effects in Inkscape. He has also contributed many improvements to other tools, including the measure and spray tools, UI, extensions, in addition to helping newcomers within the community use Inkscape. As a member of the Vectors Team, Jabier helps promote the software. He welcomes the opportunity inherent only to open source projects to be an advanced user who can tangibly influence the development of the application he is using.

Mihaela Jurkovic (@prkos) has been involved with all things Inkscape for over 12 years. She has contributed to all aspects of Inkscape community. Author of Inkscape 0.48 Illustrator’s Cookbook, which is aimed at helping new Inkscape users learn how to accomplish specific goals designed to help them learn Inkscape as fast as possible. As a member of the Vectors Team, Mihaela helps with marketing, branding and technical tasks, while putting her business experience to work for the project.

https://www.inkscape.org

Creating photorealistic vector illustrations is a challenging task. Tools such as the gradient mesh or diffusion curves facilitate the design process, but are often not versatile enough or require a workflow that differs significantly from the natural approach an artist would take. In this presentation we discuss the relevant vector primitives currently available and consider some recently proposed extensions. Finally, we look at the compatibility of these tools in the context of Inkscape and SVG 2.

Pieter Barendrecht obtained his BSc and MSc degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Computer Graphics at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, focusing on the application of splines in vector graphics, numerical analysis and 3D modelling.

http://www.cs.rug.nl/svcg/People/PieterBarendrecht

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