I attended Libreplanet 2014 two weeks ago heard some great talks presented by the free software community. The theme for this year's conference was "Free Software, Free Society", and was focused on activism, privacy, and surveillance. I saw Richard Stallman and he gave a keynote, so I can scratch that off my bucket list. My personal favorite was Sue Gardner's keynote which focused on a lot of things, but mainly the transformation of the internet. You can watch her keynote here.
A vast majority of the talks focused on activism. These included privacy and surveillance, free culture and free media, free software in education, race and gender in the free software movement, open science, and how technology is helping people with disabilities. There were a lot of thoughtful discussions going around. It was quite different than I any other technology conference I had attended.
I met two Outreach Program for Women participants, Karen Tang and Sucheta Ghoshal, and OPW program organizers Karen Sandler and Marina Zhurakhinskaya. I got to hear and discuss some new ideas for expanding the OPW. I was extremely happy when they were awarded the Free Software Foundation's Award for Social Benefit.
I also attended the 0th SpinachCon, which is an event held to improve user-friendliness of FOSS projects. I learned about a extremely cool media project called MediaGoblin. It's an alternative to Flickr, Youtube, and it can store sound and 3-D models (and is accepting donations).
(Yours truly on the bottom left testing out MediaGoblin. CC-BY-SA 3.0 By Bryan Smith)
You can watch some of the panels and presentations here. I recommend watching the keynote by Jacob Appelbaum (and the one by Sue Gardner, of course). There were a lot of awesome presentations, but unfortunately not all of them were recorded.
