Personal LGM 2012 report

Written in the airplane

"Hi all, LGM is over and we have to return real life. No more workshops and friendly talks at least face to face.

I am flying right now to Bilbao and is hard to describe my first meeting with the LGM event. Is a mix of different feelings, all interesting in fact, and these will be with me the rest of my life.

As Mairin Duffy said, these are moments where we really feel the open source feeling and we are happy and comfortable among the different project developers.

More info... continue reading

My first contact was with the Flossmanuals and Scribus team people : Elisa Castro, Cedric Gemy, Alessandro, Claudia, Louie,. (Timothee Giet arrived one day later) and it was very nice to see how i was received. Claudia brought me some food (it was 1am ) but we were talking till late.

First Day. Wednesday 2

First morning was absolutelly crazy. We started with colour management, and you know this is not the easiest part of Digital image field. Richard Huges presented a good talk showing his project (colorimeter)and talking about how the project evolved during the process, But he is a native english speaker and talked too fast imo and other people. The same for the rest on the morning.

So imagine my first impressions. I was shocked and i had to give my talk there tomorrow. I decided to speak slower and taking lot of care of microphone stuff. We cant miss anything more.

I had to go to the apartment in the evening to wait for my lost suitcase.(yes the airlines lost my suitcase, long story) I was waiting , and waiting, but my suitcase was dissapeared yet. I decided to call them and Surprise ! They sent my the suitcase to another Adress in Vienna. :S

Thursday 3

Inkscape talk.

it was the time for inkscape and more development stuff. Inkscape is getting more and more powerful and the developers are so interested in promote and help that after the talk.

My Talk : Digital Painting With open source tools. 

I tried to do my best explaining with examples my 30 min talk. I am very happy and proud because people were asking some interesting questions. Really cool and instructive experience.the talk was created to be motivational for coders, demostrative for users, and not complicated for non users and visits.

After that i was more in relaxed, and i enjoyed more the LGM. Thanks to Elisa Castro who was my french translator and PR for these days i was very comfortable between french talking people. 

another epic moment, this day Gimp 2.8 was released

Friday 4

Gimp Day. Open CL and GEGL  this day and lot of goats. Mitch and Pippin gave a talk about how GEGL is a very interesting gimp feature with lot of good things to discover. They made some examples showing for example how gegl afects the way indexed images react, how to manipulate EXR files and again more technical stuff. Their work has been in the shadows for a long time but now is ready to show it. Good job! 

Saturday 5

The Day for Krita and Synfig. LukasT presented the new features of Krita 2.4. Krita created a very good feeling and i can see more and more people interested in this project. LukasT is a very nice guy and he listen always carefully what users said. good feedback. we talked more later about new ideas for future.

Konstantin from Synfig project, presented a talk about Remake. i have to give it a try because the program looks interesting and is very well documented.

Animtim had to give a workshop about Krita, and was a total success. The room was full and people were listening and watching what he did.

In another room Gimp team had a meeting. Mypaint (Martin and Jonnor) and Konstantin (Synfig, Morevna open movie) were there too.

The talk was nice, with a good collaboration and open mind feeling. Schumacher was transcripting the basic ideas by IRC in #gimp channel.

We talked about lot of things like:

• Presets packs and previews. (icons vs previews)
• Dynamics Save button (reset State)
• Performance
• Workspaces
• Gegl and future filters.
• New Save and export change
• Remove deprecated things
• Web stuff

I felt comfortable with the gimp team.

Sunday 6

My sightseeing day. Wonderful day in Prater and different important places of Vienna. I was at Prater with Ricardo Lafuente, Ana Carvalho (from Libregraphicsmag) and Diana.

Viena has a lot of wonderful places to visit and enjoy. The monuments scale is huge and is impressive how they look on sunset.

Monday 7

Airport Day. I hate airports, you all know, but in this case it has been not so boring, because i was thinking about what i have done during the LGM. Exhausting experience but i will repeat the next year if i can.

Extra LGM

Metalab People is Great. First time we went they were so charm.. Pepi one of the partners, showed the entire metalab, a very nice Hackerspace full of Creative things. Like 3d printers, wood machines, photo lab, chill out space with Video consoles and TV... Pepi talked more about how they are organized. I asked about his manifesto and he showed me the metalab website.

After that i met Silvia Schiuliani from ParticipativeDesign, what a charm girl. Her talk at LGM was so interesting that i asked if i can copy it to use some of her quotes with very good ideas that makes you think about the psicological and social part of open source. We were talking a bit more while we were dinning at metalab. Her Talk

More info and reports

• Nicu Buculei (Nicu) http://nicubunu.blogspot.com.es/2012/05/
• Animtim (Timothee Giet) http://timotheegiet.com/blog/floss/lgm-2012-a-crazy-week-in-vienna.html
• LukasT (Lukáš Tvrdý) http://lukast.mediablog.sk/log/?p=420