Name of presentation: Free Software and anarchy
Description: The speech will be non-technical and, after a short introduction to anarchism, would focus on ways of organizing a (big) project populated by volunteers in efficient ways. Examples of projects like debian and gentoo getting
drowned in bureaucracy and internal problems underline how important those questions are, and some solutions, or at least ideas, can be found in political theory, and especially anarchism, which advocates having a structure that works completely without hierarchy or power relations. I would take my examples from my experience as a gentoo developer, some ways in which I think it could have been changed, and the reasons that made me resign from it.
Bio: I am currently a PhD student in computer science at Chalmers, Göteborg,
and I have been a gentoo developer from 2004 to march 2006, maintaining
TeX and Ocaml software and as part of the user relations team.
URL:
Contact: buisse@cs.chalmers.se
Interview
For a little background, can you describe the general topic of your presentation and tell us what is new in the last few months?
I will be ((very) quickly) presenting the political theory of anarchy, explaining how it actually is the *opposite* of chaos and in which ways it can help big free software projects to organize themselves.
Can you give a summary of what you will present? Why should someone choose to come to your presentation?
I don't expect to have much time to present things in detail but will throw ideas around and hope people will catch them. If you are involved in any project where relationships between participants can be problematic (i.e. most probably any project with more than one developer), then you might be interested, if only to possibly broaden your views of how to organize a big project. Alternatively, if you think freedom means more than commiting a COPYING file to a repository, you might be interested.
How did you get involved in Free Software and in what way is it important to you?
I've always cared about freedom, especially when it deals with information, when giving it away actually makes you richer. And I also acknowledge that most of the times, free software is technically better than closed-source (or even open-source (*cough* *cough* mozilla *cough* *cough*) equivalents). And as a photographer, I'm also very interested in Creative Commons licenses.
I have been involved in several projects and started some of my own, but my main work has been as a gentoo developer from 2005 to 2007. Right now, I'm not developing much anymore, mainly from lack of time.
Is there any other particular presentation you'll be going to? Why is that topic of interest?
I plan on attending the talks about the political aspects of Free Software, like SELF, Women in Free Software or the one about decision making in NGOs. Technical talks about OLPC and gimp also interest me much.
