Call for Participation

Call for Participation is now closed!

We can still accept proposals, but we can't guarantee that they will be dealt with in a timely manner and they will be given a lower priority than those received within the deadline.

Introduction

The Free Society Conference and Nordic Summit (FSCONS) is a meeting place for social change, focused on the future of free software and free society. The conference brings together people from a wide range of fields, and merges the technical with the social, seeking both to activate and challenge. Open discussion and brainstorming are as important as the talks given during the conference.

Participation

For this years conference we're looking for talks on a number of different issues or projects (both full-length and lightning talks), but we're also looking specifically for workshops to be held during the conference, or in the week before as pre-conference activities. All proposals that are submitted will be reviewed by members of the community before the final decisions are made.

In order to submit your proposal, please go to FSCONS 2010 Submit Proposal. This form is to be used for your own submissions. If you have ideas of other people you want to listen to, please feel free to suggest those in the FSCONS Wiki. When you fill out the form, we would like to ask you to provide the following information. Please keep in mind that the title and summary may be read by community reviewers. When deciding on the appropriate time slot, please calculate about five minutes for questions and answers by the audience. For example, a 45 minute talk will be 40 minutes of presentation and five minutes for questions.

  • Author name(s)
  • Contact Information
  • Preferred time slot (30, 45, or lightning)
  • Title of proposal
  • Summary of proposal

Important dates

The deadline for submissions is the 30th of June 2010. Accepted proposals will be notified as soon as possible after that date, but at the latest on the 31st of July 2010.

If your proposal for a talk is accepted, we would like to ask you to submit your full presentation in PDF format at latest one week before the conference. If your presentation will include audio or video material, we would prefer to receive those in Ogg Theora and Ogg Vorbis formats, so that we can make sure that they can be played during the presentation. We understand that not all would be able to give their presentation as PDF, or have other technical requirements that needs to be addressed. Please note those in your proposal, so that they can be taken into consideration when planning your session.

Themes

We're looking for topics that relate to Free Society or Free Software generally, as well as those which are at the crossroads of the two or which take the philosophy of Free Society and Free Software and brings them to a whole new field. The currently confirmed themes are:

  • Embedded systems - The use of Linux and free software generally in embedded systems is increasing exponentially. In some ways, it's more common than not to use free software when developing new devices. Moving through the seven layers of the OSI model, this theme explores modern embedded systems, from the physical layer to the applications.
  • Infrastructure Monitoring - Long ago, it was common for users to report when a system was not working. Today, we expect our administrators to discover before the users does that a system is not working properly, and we want to collect statistical data to ensure that service-level agreements requiring a 99,95% availability is being met. Nagios, Cacti, OpenNMS and Zabbix have all grown in importance during the last couple of years as a result of the increasing requirements of infrastructure monitoring, as well as the increasing complexity of the same. What does the future look like for these tools, and what are the current trends in monitoring systems? How do we scale our monitoring to thousands of machines? How do we monitor the cloud? These are all key questions we hope to address with this theme.
  • Makers of the Future - Reprep is a "rapid prototyping system that is capable of producing its own parts and can therefore be replicated easily". The philosophy of the free software movement: being able to use, share and improve software, gets a real life counterpart in the Hackerspaces, Fablab, Makerbot, Reprep and Open Source Ecology communities. Turning every citizen into a creator is a central issue of this theme, which will explore both the underlying philosophy as well as the actual means of creation.
  • Net Neutrality and Openness - The "FRA Law", ECHELON and Onyx all raise questions about privacy on the Internet and the necessity of darknets, onion routing via TOR, and other techniques for protecting citizens rights online. This is being amplified by the introduction of data retention directives and other means of policing the Internet. While governments are said to promote an inclusive global agenda, with the Internet as one of its key components, their actions are in many ways contradictory and seem to move more in the direction of stifling innovation and discouraging openness. What can we as citizens do to protect our rights, and how can we increase the competency of governments to make informed decisions?
  • Ethics - How does new technology influence our moral values, and are recent developments in society on a par with contemporary values? During this theme, we will explore the multifaceted issue of contemporary ethics. Is it morally acceptable to share digital artifacts with your friends, and if it is, what does that say about the ethics of new regulations and laws seeking to criminalise or introduce harsher punishments for such actions? The theme will try to find an answer to these questions, as well as to pose the question of what is morally acceptable in todays society, and the influence of this.

But don't let this restrict your thinking: you can submit a suggestion even if it doesn't quite fit into any of the above themes. Some themes we have been thinking about, and might be planning, even if we currently don't have any ideas for speakers in them. So you might be one of them! You can find more information about themes which are currently planned on the FSCONS wiki.