Posts Tagged ‘MFS’

Manchester Free Software

Wednesday, January 4th, 2012

Manchester Free Software

Title: Manchester Free Software
Location: MadLab
Description: The purpose of Manchester Free Software is to promote the Free Software philosophy.
Start Time: 19:00
Date: 2012-01-17
End Time: 20:30

 

 

 

 

 

 

Embrace your Community: an open model for business

  • Talk: Embrace your Community: an open model for business
  • Speakers: Mark Keating (Managing Director) & Matt Trout (Technical Director),
    Shadowcat Systems Limited

Details

“How can you benefit from free software in business? How can you run a business in which most of what you work with and produce isn’t charged for? What is the value in engaging with a non-profit orientated community? Why would you want to engage with a community that can critically be described as a social exercise in collaborative one-upmanship?”

“In this talk Mark will use the experience gained from several years managing a free software consultancy to discuss the benefits to business of working with free software and engaging with the community. Using Shadowcat Systems, the Perl language and associated community as a basis for that talk.”

The event will include a Q&A session, discussion and then lively debate in the pub afterwards.

Speakers

  • Mark Keating:
  • “Mark Keating is the managing director of Shadowcat Systems Limited. He is married to Leigh and has a son called Benjamin Connor, they all live in Lancaster, in the United Kingdom with a cat called Darwin and several tropical fish. He stumbled sideways into the magnificent world of Perl by way of linguistics, literature, a publishing company and an undefined close association with Matt Trout. He is a neophyte evangelist of modern Perl and an advocate of Enlightenment thinking.”

    “Mark likes to think that he fills his days as an ‘adminion’ but is also a writer, keen amateur photographer and herder of (programming) cats. Mark has been advocating free software and open organisations for many years and has become deeply involved in the communities associated with the work carried out by Shadowcat Systems.”

    Mark is: Director and Secretary of the Enlightened Perl Organisation, Marketing Chair of the The Perl Foundation Marketing Committee, Marketing and PR for The Perl Foundation Steering Committee, co-Leader of North West England Perl Mongers, Organiser of London Perl Workshop (UKPW), co-Organiser of the Dynamic Languages Conference and manager of the Send-A-Newbie initiative. In 2011 he also helped to organise the QA Hackathon, and the Google Summer of Code and Google Code-in (in which he also mentored) on behalf of the Perl Foundation.”

  • Matt Trout:
  • “Matt S Trout was thrust into Perl at the tender age of seventeen by a backup accident. Two weeks later he realised that he was in love with the language and has been happily using it for systems automation, network, web and database development ever since.”

    “He is co-maintainer of the Catalyst web framework (and co-author of The Definitive Guide to Catalyst), the creator of the DBIx::Class ORM, Web::Simple, Tak and HTML::Zoom and a core team member for the Moose metaprotocol and object system, as well as contributing to assorted other CPAN projects.”

    “Matt spends his days leading the technical team at Shadowcat Systems Limited.”

  • Shadowcat Systems Limited
  • “Is an free software consultancy specialising in Perl, CPAN, applications deployment and systems architecture. Shadowcat sponsors web, source repository, integration initiatives, conferences, workshops, hackathons and mailing list hosting for a large number of projects related to Perl and the broader open source and free software communities. Shadowcat creates and releases free software both internally and on behalf of its clients.”

Transport

Parking

Around the venue there are parking meter bays that become zero cost after 8pm on Tuesday so you’ll have to pay up until then and the maximum stay is 2 hours BUT MAKE SURE YOU VERIFY THIS. There are paid parking lots around the venue, the light blue P in this OpenStreetMap centred on Madlab. A lot of them, perhaps all, are are owned by NCP. If you can’t decide otherwise then park in Manchester Arndale.

Public Transport

Manchester Victoria (MCV) train station, Shudehill tram station and Manchester Piccadilly bus station are all fairly close to Madlab, see OpenStreetMap centred on Madlab. Manchester Piccadilly (MAN) train station and Manchester Central Coach Station are not too far either.

Manchester Free Software

Wednesday, November 2nd, 2011

Manchester Free Software

Title: Manchester Free Software
Location: MadLab
Description: The purpose of Manchester Free Software is to promote the Free Software philosophy.
Start Time: 19:00
Date: 2011-12-13
End Time: 20:30

Manchester Free Software

Thursday, October 27th, 2011

Manchester Free Software

Title: Manchester Free Software
Location: MadLab
Description: The purpose of Manchester Free Software is to promote the Free Software philosophy.
Start Time: 19:00
Date: 2011-11-15
End Time: 20:30

 

 

 

 

Diaspora and Distributed/Federated Social Networking

Details

This talk will be on Diaspora, which is an implementation of Distributed/Federated Social Networking, and on Distributed/Federated Social Networking in general.

The event will include a Q&A session, discussion and then lively debate in the pub afterwards.

Speaker

Ellie is passionate about educating people of the need to move away from Centralised Social Networking to Distributed/Federated Social Networking.

Transport

Parking

Around the venue there are parking meter bays that become zero cost after 8pm on Tuesday so you’ll have to pay up until then and the maximum stay is 2 hours BUT MAKE SURE YOU VERIFY THIS. There are paid parking lots around the venue, the light blue P in this OpenStreetMap centred on Madlab. A lot of them, perhaps all, are are owned by NCP. If you can’t decide otherwise then park in Manchester Arndale.

Public Transport

Manchester Victoria (MCV) train station, Shudehill tram station and Manchester Piccadilly bus station are all fairly close to Madlab, see OpenStreetMap centred on Madlab. Manchester Piccadilly (MAN) train station and Manchester Central Coach Station are not too far either.

Manchester Free Software

Monday, October 3rd, 2011

Manchester Free Software

Title: Manchester Free Software
Location: MadLab
Description: The purpose of Manchester Free Software is to promote the Free Software philosophy
Start Time: 19:00
Date: 2011-10-18
End Time: 20:30

Gaming Freedom

Thursday, May 5th, 2011

Manchester Free Software

Title: Gaming Freedom
Location: MadLab
Description: Extraordinary Talk: Game On – Game Creation and Distribution with Gluon

Start Time: 19:00
Date: 2011-11-28
End Time: 20:30








Extraordinary Talk: Game On – Game Creation and Distribution with Gluon


Speaker: Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen

Details

This talk is on a project where Free Software meets Creative Commons meets the “Gamers’ Bill of Rights“. (Part of this includes the recommending of non-free software licences, which Manchester Free Software does not endorse.).

Dan’s talk description:

“Building computer games is fast becoming big business, not just for the big companies, but also for the little companies. Witness the success of smaller studios like Rovio of Angry Birds fame (30 people) and Minecraft (one single person), and you can see why there is no reason why we cannot create games in the open source world to sit alongside these successes. But we need tools for this: Ways of easily constructing the games, modern and effective distribution methods, ways of getting the users’ feedback and so on.”

“Enter Gluon, an open platform for creating and distributing games. This talk will shortly explain the ideas behind Gluon, and present the GamingFreedom.org network for makers and players of games. Finally a live demonstration of the Gluon Creator tool used to build games will show you just how easy it is to build games today, and why you can do it, without needing to know everything about game creation.”

The event will include a Q&A session, discussion and then lively debate in the pub afterwards.

Speaker

“Dan, known to most people as Leinir, is a software developer who started out by ruining his possibilities for the next few years by learning Visual Basic 3 as his first language. However, from there he jumped later to PHP, which he worked on as a part of a Multimedia Designer course, and finally decided to learn properly, starting at Aalborg University’s informatics course, which now, five years later, has resulted in an MSc in software construction, specialised in game and engine programming. His active involvement with the open source community began when he joined the Amarok team as usability guy in 2006, and finally in 2009 he joined the Gluon team. Here he helped refine the library layout, and was primus motor for developing the Gluon Vision, as well as being one of two core developers on the Gluon Engine system. In June 2010 he finishes his Master’s Thesis, and following this he has moved to England, where he now resides, working for the small consultancy company KO GmbH on the free office engine Calligra. He, of course, still works on Gluon in his spare time, devoting a great deal of energy to that.”