Wm Salt Hale

With the upheaval of Twitter many folks have been forced to wonder what would happen if their platform were taken away. Will all of your witty Tweets be lost to time or attributed to someone else? What about your Swarm check-ins, Instagram stories, and other social shares? And why do we have to decide which walled garden to post our thoughts in? The IndieWeb has been growing since 2013 and strives to create an alternative to content silos and the 'corporate web'. This is achieved through creating a single source of truth for your content and identity aka a personal domain. There are three core concepts that are important to understanding this movement: 'Your content is yours' not FB/Twitter/etc, 'You are better connected' by pushing to multiple services, and 'You are in control' of the content, format, and permanence of your links. Let's explore what a small-web might look like, discuss questions of content ownership, and see what steps one has to take to join the IndieWeb, together!

Have you (or a group of friends) started a free software project? How about a usergroup or conference? Maybe you haven't yet, but are definitely considering it. Or, have you tried to start something new and found it didn't work out the way you wanted? Have you witnessed the rise and decline of projects and events, and are you willing to share your stories? Come to the FLOSS Founders BoF and discuss your experience! Alright, so this isn't just a meet and greet. Two researchers from the University of Washington studying founder decisions would like to reach out to the source to learn what works and what doesn't. We'll both be at DebConf this year and are interested in gaining perspective from people who are willing to participate in a group discussion, sharing their thoughts about the process behind how FLOSS things are founded, and how that foundation may in turn influence their development and sustainability. Hope to see you there!

Other people: Kaylea Champion

Does a package's license family (protective versus permissive) impact how resilient the development activity is after a security advisory is released? This question was tested in my recently defended master's thesis. As I edit and refine the work for further publication, it seems appropriate to present to the community that I based my analysis on. I will be presenting an overview of previous scholarship in this area, the dataset that I built, the results of my statistical modeling, and a variety of implications this could have on future projects. Additionally, I intend to leave room to answer your questions and receive any feedback. This talk should be approachable by anyone, but may be of increased interest to FLOSS project founders, those interested in software licensing, and anyone involved in research.

Do you have a pile of sticky notes and a folder full of spreadsheets with contacts? Have you ever had a donor approached by two people trying to gather the same information? As an organization or project grows, it often becomes hard to keep track of the various community members, donors, and volunteers who are connected. An answer to this is the often used sales tool, a contact relationship manager (CRM). You will learn about a non-sales focused tool, CiviCRM and see how it can be combined with Discourse and various Drupal forms to clean up and funnel your contact data.

Snowdrift.coop is a web platform for fundraising and supporting free/libre/open projects. We are tackling the 'snowdrift dilemma' that limits contributions to non-rivalrous goods such as open-source software. The organization is a non-profit multi-stakeholder cooperative, and all code is available under OSI and FSF approved licenses.

After a couple years of prototyping and experimentation (live on the main website), we have recently focused on three main areas: (1) opening the project to greater participation through code refactoring and tool development, (2) firming up the co-op governance structure, and (3) creating a comprehensive design framework for the website. There is also plenty of ongoing feature development on various aspects of the site.

The funding mechanism is not yet functional but progressing. Once functional, Snowdrift.coop itself will be a supported project, and should prove to be an excellent test-case for the adoption and success of the concept. In the meanwhile, we are actively looking for ways to improve both productivity and opportunities for our distributed team of volunteers. Experienced Haskellers are invited to mentor volunteers, take ownership of component libraries, and provide opinions and insights. New Haskellers---not to mention designers, writers, economists, legal professionals, or anyone else philosophically inclined to our mission of freeing the commons---are especially welcome; we pride ourselves on being inclusive and approachable by (non-)programmers at any level of technical sophistication!