Bristol Wireless News

At 6 pm on Friday 3rd April, Bristol Wireless is jointly hosting a talk entitled Nowtopia at St Werburghs Community Centre (map here) in conjunction with our friends from Bristol Radical History Group and Bristol Anarchist Bookfair.

The event will be of interest to radical historians and futurists, permaculturalists, free-skillers, open sourcerers, class warriors, transition towners, anarchistas and workplace tinkerers.

From the poster blurb it sounds a fascinating evening and will definitely provide food for thought. In addition, we’ll have the Bristol Wireless bar on tap to refresh those parts that intellectual stimulation fails to reach.

There’s no set admission price, but donations will be appreciated.

Your scribe discovered yesterday that today has been designated Ada Lovelace Day by Pledgebank and is intended to promote the role of women in technology.

The Pledgebank pledge for Ada Lovelace Day is:

“I will publish a blog post on Tuesday 24th March about a woman in technology whom I admire but only if 1,000 other people will do the same.”

For those who don’t know her, Ada (or Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace) is mainly known for having written a description of Charles Babbage’s early mechanical computer, the analytical engine. She is today appreciated as the “first programmer” since she was writing programs, i.e. manipulating symbols according to rules, for a machine that Babbage had not yet built. This was quite an achievement for a woman in Victorian England and one who only lived to the age of 36.

Well, your scribe feels most reluctant to pick any particular woman: all those I’ve met in the technology field have been exceptional, particularly in a sector in which blokes predominate.

However, those that do come immediately mind include Laura from South Devon, an open source software developer, who for years managed to combine this role with a day job in the voluntary sector. Then there’s Rachel, a very busy web developer and joint organiser of Bristol Dorkbot (cheers for a fine event last weekend Rachel ). Another long-standing friend is Ingrid Oesten: I first became aware of her technological bent many years ago when husband Royce told me she was doing a computer science degree. I last heard of her working for Infineon, a job that has taken her all over the world. Finally, there’s Winnie from Bristol University, whose knowledge of the internals of Linux leaves me very humble.

The above paragraph brings home to me that we’re very, very short of women volunteers for Bristol Wireless; if you’d care to join us, please get in touch.

On 24th March (next Tuesday) the Arnolfini is hosting a talk entitled ‘The Art and Politics of P2P. It’s free, starts at 7 pm and the speakers are Michel Bauwens, Matthew Fuller and Olga Goriunova.

The presentation introduces the work of the Foundation for Peer-to-Peer Alternatives – a clearing house for open/free, participatory/p2p and commons-oriented initiatives. The interest is in how P2P networks challenge hierarchical server-client relations and provide an alternative organisational principle for understanding cultural production and the creation of value. In discussion we aim to explore the potential of this way of thinking to re-energise the production of art following the principle that emergent and radical arts practices can be found in social energies not yet recognised as art.

The event is being run in collaboration with Art & Social Technologies Research (University of Plymouth) and Pervasive Media Studio/Watershed. For further details, see the Arnolfini website.

This coming Saturday 21st March sees Bristol Dorkbot’s regular monthly meet, only this time both the day (normally Tuesday) and venue have been changed, the latter to Hamilton House on Stokes Croft (map).

Once again our friends at Bristol Dorkbot are at Hamilton House and this month’s challenge will be to Hack a Hat! (Are edged weapons involved? Ed.) Hat can be hi/low tech and some materials will be provided, with individual and team entries .

During the day, there’ll also be an Open dork session, so bring along your latest electronics, robotics, art, psychology, etc. to show and tell what it’s all about, discuss with others, exchange tips and generally dork out!

For refreshment, there’ll be soup (vegan) and bread for lunch for a modest donation and you’re invited to bring along anything you’d like to augment the larder.

The March Dorkbot will run from 12 noon till 6pm and you can sign up here. Full details are on Bristol Dorkbot.

If you feel like giving the event a bit of promotion, try printing and/or circulating the flyer, which is available in both A6 and A4 formats.

Finally, Bristol Dorkbot now have a Twitter account, so fellow twits (? Ed.) can follow the fun there.

Opening my inbox this morning revealed the arrival of news from Europe (Not Brussels though; no need to shudder and fear the worst! Ed. ). Yesterday, 11th March, saw the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) celebrating its 2^3 (eighth) birthday. Over that time, the FSFE has been working for basic rights and freedoms in a society increasingly driven by software.

“The world of Free Software has developed dramatically since FSFE was founded and FSFE was a core part of that change,” says FSFE’s Georg Greve. “Free Software has won its first anti-trust action. We helped to bring issues of interoperability and standardisation to the forefront of the debate, with OOXML being the culmination of this debate. As a consequence, more governments and public institutions have begun to ask questions about the sovereignty of their software and data.” (including the UK government. Ed.)

Over the last 8 years, FSFE has been working intensively at the United Nations, promoted Free Software interests at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), contributed to the Internet Governance Forum (IGF), taken part in discussions at the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) and taught World Bank project managers about Free Software. FSFE has also worked with the European Commission in its anti-trust work and assisted the Commission by offering input into policy-setting initiatives.

There’s more information in the full FSFE press release. In the meantime keep up the good work FSFE; we at Bristol Wireless wish you many happy returns.

Just arrived in my inbox is an email from fellow Bristol Wireless volunteer and joint Dorkbot Bristol organiser Mike, informing us that Xtream, in which Bristol Wireless is a partner, are in streaming action tonight.

Mike writes:

Thought you might be interested to know that XtreamLab’s streaming Femelek 2009 tonight. This is a Barcelona festival to celebrate Women and Electronic Music. It starts at 7PM GMT until 11PM GMT. I’ve done a micro-site page for it.

And there’s also the festival’s own MySpace page.

OSOR reports that the French Gendarmerie’s gradual migration to a completely open source desktop and web applications has saved millions of euro. “This year the IT budget will be reduced by 70 per cent. This will not affect our IT systems,” says Lieutenant-Colonel Xavier Guimard.

This Thursday, Guimard gave a presentation in Utrecht in the Netherlands on the move from a Microsoft-based to an Ubuntu GNU/Linux-based desktop. The Lieutenant-Colonel was one of the keynote speakers at an annual conference organised by NOiV, the Dutch national resource centre on open source and open standards.

Most of the savings are reported to have come from licensing costs and the full story can be read here.

Yesterday our friends at Connecting Bristol hosted a Techno Footprint Green ICT Workshop, organised jointly with the council’s Sustainable City Team and The Carbon Trust.

The participants came from a wide range of organisations, ranging from charities, the community and voluntary sector, local authorities, the local universities, NHS, local, national and multinational businesses. It was good to see familiar faces there from Voscur and Knowle West Web.

After a brief introduction from Connecting Bristol’s Stephen Hilton, we were in the hands of consultants Camco, who outlined the CO2 contribution of ICT. In the Bristol area, non-domestic ICT use consumes 125.2 million KWh of electricity, resulting in the emission of 67.3 KT of CO2.

There was lively discussion, both during the presentation session itself and subsequent group session. Points that particularly struck me were the mention of PoE devices, train operator First Great Western’s hardware cutback (thousands of faxes, scanners and printers replaced by multi-function devices with huge energy savings) and long hardware replacement cycle, plus HP’s business travel restrictions. Of course, it was a good opportunity for Bristol Wireless to promote Linux thin clients and relate our experiences with low-impact computing at the Climate Camp and Big Green Gathering.