[LGM] LGM 2021 Process

Thu Jun 27 14:59:47 UTC 2019

Hey everybody,

We are very excited about moving our proposal forward. Even if you do not
have any questions or concerns, please let us know here if you support this
proposal to hold LGM in Colombo, Sri Lanka.

Since we did not see any public comments on the list regarding our 2021
proposal from Sri Lanka <https://hackmd.io/m4nzIvaPTpmWB-LT64GJSA> we
thought we will address some of the considerations raised at the
organisational meeting on 30th May 2019 at LGM - Saarbrücken, notes here
<https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/libre-graphics-meeting/2019-June/002496.html>.
One of the reasons that we withdrew our proposal from 2020 is that we need
a two year timeframe to work on organising the community here in SL and the
region. We look at LGM 2021 in SL as an opportunity for LGM to go ‘Global’
and an opportunity for us to organise the community in Sri Lanka and
promote free culture and FLOSS in creative fields.

*1. Familiarity of the organisers *

>  It is very much in our interest to approve a 2021 proposal in the near
future so as to let the team start planning and to work alongside the 2020
team for practice
> It is important that anybody hosting LGM be familiar with it and know
people in the community to facilitate communication in both directions.
Several people want to be assured that the prospective 2021 team have at
least one representative at the 2020 event.

I will shadow the 2020 team and also plan to attend the conference in
Rennes. Unless there is a visa issue I will be there.

To give some background, the two main communities that will be part of the
local team are Hanthana Linux <http://hanthana.org/> community and Akuru
Collective <https://akuru.space/>. The both communities have relevant
experience and expertise. Hanthana Linux project which celebrates 10 years
in 2019 has experience in community organising, running free software
projects and training for both community and the government officials,
specially in the education sector. Akuru Collective which is relatively
young has organised two international type design and typography
conferences and has a good team. One of the first activities of Akuru
Collective was Sinhala Typography Design Competition
<https://github.com/akuru/akuru.github.io/blob/1d3d61cd1ce0a25fe7b9df52315e6bcb6ab2007c/index.md>
which
only accepted work done with Free software. We gave out 10 tickets to
Typoday 2016 conference to winners. And we have worked with the hosts,
Faculty of Architecture Research Unit and the Department of Integrated
Design, University of Moratuwa very closely on two conferences already.
Department of Integrated Design has asked us work on a workshop programme
for the students. We planned this
<https://hackmd.io/OqxY5DM8TyevcXvSWucVxg?both> for last year and we can
pick it up when we have confirmation.

However do I am the only person who has attended a LGM before (LGM 2016 in
London, I did a lighting talk on language support
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWSwgtdKiNQ>:) in the local team.  I
usually follow the discussions on the LGM list, even though I have not
contributed much in the discussions. The other two members of the local
team have experience in working in and with free software and mobilising
communities and running events at both local and international scale. I am
confident that we understand the expectations of LGM and can cater to them.
Danishaka <https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Snavin> and Lohan
<https://lohangunaweera.tk/> both represent the Hanthana Linux project.

*2. Low turnout from the regulars*

>  Turn-out in general matters, but turn-out among people on existing teams
is also important, as a large part of the purpose of the meeting is to
coordinate the activities of project teams.
>   Due to travel cost, unless our fundraising continues apace, some people
who come to LGM when it is in Europe would almost certainly not go to Sri
Lanka.
>   Others may have other concerns that would keep them from going.

As ’large part of the purpose of the meeting is to coordinate the
activities of project teams’ it is important to do everything to facilitate
the attendance of project teams. However it really doesn’t make sense to
fly all the way here when most of the project teams are based in Europe.
Can we justify burning precious funds to come all the way here to Sri
Lanka? Local team can do a few things to add value for a project team
flying down here.

1. Regionally important and relevant extra events
     - Translation hackathons
     -  Hackathons specially focused on text layout support for South Asian
scripts.
        We hope to reach out and promote the event in India and other
regional communities. This might be a good opportunity for project teams to
meet different group of users.
    -  User meetings

*SIDENOTE*: Also we are discuss facilitating usual pre-conf and post-conf
hackathons next to the beaches in Down South Sri Lanka :) Get in touch with
us if you are interested in planning. There is a strong FOSS presence in
the education sector in the Southern Sri Lanka. Hanthana Linux has its
roots in the South. We held our first outreach programme last week; a two
day workshop on ‘Art and Design with Free Software’ for 30 high school
teachers (ICT and Graphic Design subjects) of the Southern Province. Here
<https://hackmd.io/eIGY87OuQO-Mf0ZnAmGjsg> are some pics and notes. They
will start teaching GIMP and Inkscape instead of proprietary tools. I will
write a bit more on this below.

2. Potential contributors, collaborators and GSoC contributors
Sri Lanka has been in the top 10 countries in highest number of GSoC
contributors
<http://digit.lk/sri-lanka-tops-list-at-google-summer-of-code-for-7th-consecutive-year/>
 for many years
<https://opensource.googleblog.com/2017/06/google-summer-of-code-2017-statistics.html>
and
the prospective host of LGM 2021, University of Moratuwa has had the
highest number of applicants in 2008
<https://foss.lk/blog/university-of-moratuwa-tops-google-list-of-summer-of-code-programmers/>
.
Well, this is not necessarily an indication of anything greater. We will
promote contributing to Libre Graphics projects as part of our outreach
plan in the universities and hope we can work on getting a few contributors
to
participating projects. I guess, statistically it makes sense to come here
if you are looking for contributors ;)  I am not going to go into detail
about potential in India and the wider region. Im thinking about projects
like Pratham Books <https://storyweaver.org.in/>,

3. Help with any travel and sightseeing plans;
If you are the traveling type, we can help to arrange travel and
sightseeing plans here in SL if you get in touch with us in advance. If you
travel all the way here a few extra days travelling would be nice.
Sri Lanka was ranked top country to travel in 2019 by the Lonely Planet
<https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2018/oct/23/sri-lanka-ranked-top-country-for-travel-in-2019-by-lonely-planet>,
if you care about rankings and such :)

If you are planning on coming to Sri Lanka and have any concerns you can
get in touch with me. There’s a lot to do in Sri Lanka if you are
interested in spending some extra time to make the most out of your trip.

>  On the other hand, all present agreed that it was acceptable to make
some sacrifices with regard to attendance by regulars if proportional to
the engagement opportunities provided by venturing outside our traditional
realm.
>  We all want the event to be truly global and want to find a way to
involve people from around the world.

Yes! So the our local team with the global orgnisers should work towards
making sure that we exploit all the opportunities so we outweigh the cons.

This significant departure from traditional realm means a few things;
- Usual timelines has to be adjusted to allow ample time for planning
- Composition of the audience will change (developers:users proportion
mostly)
- Being truly global means localising (structurally) the event to some
extent ( ie: the usual Free Culture Aware Educators Meeting could be an
introductory workshop for educators)
- It will be expensive (concerning the reimbursements)
- There are cultural differences, obviously
- We can use the knowledge and lessons from this to do future global events
down the line

*The opportunities we see in hosting LGM in this part of the world;*

i. Opportunity to meet users neglected by the commercial graphics software
   - Most of Sri Lankan and Indian publishing industry still use
non-Unicode system because of bad language support and stuck with licensed
older versions of popular proprietary apps because of the expensive
subscription models.
   -  Even the industry can not afford proprietary licensing (There are few
major banks using LibreOffice)
   - Graphic design was introduced to highest school syllabus last year.
GIMP is also in the syllabus :)
ii. Opportunity to work on improving complex script support in projects
iii. Opportunity to meet participants from a different geographical area,
culture and background
iv. Meet with current collaborators, contributors in the region and meet
potential new collaborators

We think a loose theme with idea of ‘Going global’ for the event would be
interesting. This will open up an opportunity to curate some talks and
presentations on
taking Libre Graphics and Free Culture global. And also focus on supporting
global writing systems in projects.

*Target audiences are the following; *

1. International: project teams, contributors
2. Regional (SA and SEA): FOSS initiatives, users, GSOC contributors
3. Local: FOSS initiatives, users, teachers, GSOC contributors

I thought How to get contributors to your Free/Libre/Open Source project
from Vietnam and Asia
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bYxP_IvB0g&list=PLe-w9p--aJKt_71MyUwDSh2hRfCogBy5B&index=13>
from
LGM 2010 is relevant to what I wrote here.

As of now, we have the following planned;

ACTIONS
- Sign an MoU with the University once we get go ahead from the LGM Global
- Grow the local organisational team
- Contacting LGM project teams directly to preliminary confirmations on
attendance
- Build a list potential projects and people in the region who can present/
participate
- Build a list of people in the region who contributed to LGM member
projects

2019
- Workshops at major design universities
- Continue teacher training programmes around the country (Primarily GIMP
and Inkscape, with other projects)
- Hanthana Linux 10 year anniversary event (September 2019)
- A design competition (We would love to work with projects teams on this :)

2020
- Mentor at-least 10 potential presenters to prepare projects and proposals
from Sri Lanka
- A Libre Graphics event on Software Freedom Day
- 30 Days of Akuru <https://www.instagram.com/30daysakuru/> with Libre
Graphics Tools

We have specific questions about responsibilities of the local team and the
global team; that is a discussion that already happening on another thread.
We hope that this proposal will move forward and this info is sufficient at
this level to evaluate.

Hope to hear your comments!  And hopefully you are excited to visit bright
and sunny Sri Lanka for LGM in 2021 :)

Regards from Colombo,
Pathum

*෴*

*Pathum Egodawatta*
Type Designer, Font Engineer and Researcher
MA Typeface Design (UK), BA (Hons) Graphic Design (LK)
*website* <https://pathumego.github.io/> | *twitter
<https://twitter.com/pathumego>  | *pathum at moonaik.com

Co-founder and Design Director,
Mooniak - a font and and editorial design studio in Colombo
mooniak.com  <http://mooniak.com/>/ hello at moooniak.com

On Thu, 6 Jun 2019 at 18:43, Gregory Pittman <gpittman at iglou.com> wrote:

> On 6/6/19 5:36 AM, Pathum Egodawatta wrote:
> > This is all really good news and we are excited! Thanks Frank for
> reporting back!
> > We have nothing to add at this point. Colombo team is on the list and
> looking forward to your questions and requests.
> >
> > We have a meeting this week and will respond in detail.
> >
>
> Hi Pathum,
>
> One thing I wanted to make sure that was understood about the 2021 site
> selection is that there was strong feeling that whoever is selected for LGM
> 2021 should become involved in the process of preparation for LGM 2020, so
> that they can learn as many details as possible about the requirements and
> challenges of hosting an LGM. Ideally, someone should attend LGM 2020 to
> become familiar with how LGM is organized and carried out, in particular
> the space and technical requirements.
>
> Greg
>
> _______________________________________________
> Libre-graphics-meeting mailing list
> Libre-graphics-meeting at lists.freedesktop.org
> https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/libre-graphics-meeting
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