LGM 2013, quick feedback

Last week, I attended the Libre Graphics Meeting in Madrid, four days of talks and workshops around libre and open source graphic tools.

It was a blast, an enormous amount of interesting talks (in a very dense 10-min format), meetings with core teams of Scribus, FontForge and other essential design tools, discussions about web standards (CSS, SGV…), and encounters with the international libre type community (represented by Vernon Adams, Nathan Willis, Manufactura Independente, OSP, Alexei Vanyashin, Dave Crossland, Raphaël Bastide and others).

Here is my todo-list following the LGM13:

• Publish the tons of photos I took. Wondering: what would be the most FLOSS-y way to do that? Owncloud? Trovebox? Piwigo? DONE! No solution is fully satisfying yet, so here’s the Dropbox link. All those images are Public Domain/CC0 1.0 Universal.
• Publish my slides online, on slideshare or whatever. DONE! here and there.
• Try out Elementary OS (linux distribution), following the strong recommendation of Miroslav Mazel. Very interesting: right now, they are crowdfunding Geary, “a modern, beautiful email app”.
• Work on the freshly imagined Libre Typeface Classification project. After discussion with Nathan, Dave, Raphaël, and others, I found that having a strong set of type classification categories would be a Good Thing. Work is going on on Github as well.
• Follow-up with Julien Deswaef (@xuv) regarding his project of a European Map of FLOSS Projects (btw, we need an etherpad-like tool for collaborative SVG editing; for now, Dropbox + Inkscape will do it).
• Continue the discussion with Pierre Huyghebaert (OSP), regarding possible strategies of engaging radical design studios (Dexter Sinister, Metahaven) into a discourse with the FLOSS design community. It’s a blind spot in design discourse and practice that needs to be filled. Relates to the critical discussion of the term “open design”. Need to check out the books mentioned by Pierre: Open Design Now (2011) and Graphic Design: Now In Production (2011).
• Find the SVG working group mailing-list (here), subscribe. DONE! Ask for features.
• Read all the other LGM reports: http://lgm2013.titanpad.com/report
• Follow-up the discussion on FLOSS in art and design eduction. What are the next steps after the “handshake” session?

So much for now. More actions soon.