Florian Effenberger

Why free software and the art of cooking have more in common than you may think

What’s probably the most unusual approach to promote the principles of free software without actually coding? Why not try some tasty open source cooking!

The principles of free software communities relate a lot to other areas of life. Many contributors work together on a common goal, where each of you brings in their individual skills and interests. You create something delicious and tasty many benefit from. If you’re passionate, you can excite your friends and family for what you do. When all of us meet, cook together, have a good time and lots of fun, we can even stay surprisingly far from our computers…

In this talk, I will make you hungry for more, will show you why cooking and free software have actually much more in common than you may think, and why working in your local community is even more tasty than in virtual space. Bon appétit!

How leadership in an open source community can work, in ten lessons learned

Many activities these days, be it sports, social work, arts or free and open source software, are organized in some sort of community. If backed by a respective organization, this not only helps with setting up a structure, but also puts statutes and rules in place that set forth the values and ideals all contributors should share. Inside these communities, there can be various roles. Some of them are formalized, like the board of directors or the supervisory board, others are within dynamically grown groups that can change frequently. Either of those are ideally composed of experienced and enthusiastic community members who take leadership and responsibility.

Based on my experience from the last 16 years, I’d like to point out common problems when working in an international free and open source community, share mistakes I’ve made and tell how you can hopefully avoid them.

TDF provides not only a stable and reliable software to its users, but also a stable and reliable infrastructure for its community. Contrary to what we had before, most of the knowledge is now inside the community, giving a flexible and scalable solution that grows with the demands of the project. This talk gives an overview on the infrastructure that drives the LibreOffice community, including technical details on server administration and management.