As Free and Open Source Software enthusiasts, we sometimes concentrate on our own experiences with software, hardware and data. But in the world of social networks, our own computing is deeply intertwined with that of our friends and family, colleagues and neighbours. Open Web standards let us stay connected to people that matter to us while using and building free, private, and technically enhanced systems. And we might even change some hearts and minds along the way!

Manufacturing hardware (devices, machines, objects) is a challenging task. High-volume sales can offset costs of production, but niche products struggle with viability. Distributed production of open source designs---having people build their own niche products---is a possible alternative.
In this talk, I will describe how digital fabrication like 3D printing, CNC milling, etc. can be used for distributed production and contrast that approach with centralized production. Through example open source hardware projects I will highlight design features that work well and less well, how community support is crucial for replication, and give recommendations for how to make more distributed production possible.

I'll walk you through my process of building interactive visual learning tools with my children and share with you what we built and let you play with them as well. Topics include logic gates, simple simulations and systems thinking.

This talk is suitable for beginners and the platforms we built are fun for adults as well. Learning can be fun :)

A profitable business is one of the best protections for commercial open source projects and communities that depend on them. This talk draws on the experience of companies that pulled it off to explain how to do it for your own projects. We’ll discuss commercial models that actually work, giving back to the community, and gracefully collecting money for free software. We'll also touch on topics for larger projects like foundations and taking VC funding. It is possible to balance a strong belief in open source communities with making payroll every two weeks. We've done it and will share our secrets.

Open research benefits researchers, institutions, and science in general: but open science practices and open source for research software aren’t always taught in universities. This talk will present a success story for filling the gaps: the Digital Research Academy. Based in Germany but working across Europe, the DRA is building a community of trainers to bridge knowledge gaps, cultivate innovation, and drive positive change through continuous learning and re-adapting. The DRA focuses on open science, data literacy and open source research software engineering: so far, we have trained over 700 people across 50+ academic institutions. This presentation will share the DRA model, success stories, and how to get involved!

This talk will introduce Chapel (https://chapel-lang.org), an open-source programming language designed to support parallel computing on multicore CPUs and GPUs, whether on personal laptops, the cloud, or the world's largest supercomputers. Chapel's goal is to support code that's as easy to read and write as Python, yet with performance and scalability that matches C, C++, OpenMP, CUDA, MPI, and other low-level approaches. This talk will cover Chapel's motivation and features, while also surveying a few flagship applications that have been written using it.

Kubernetes has changed everything. Not only the way we deploy our applications. But also how we monitor them, how we collect, store, visualize, and alert on time series data generated by monitoring systems.
What are the challenges in modern monitoring? Why have new-generation time series databases like VictoriaMetrics and Prometheus emerged? Why is there no SQL support in these databases? Why are Grafana dashboards so fancy? Join us as we explore these questions and many other questions related to the specifics of time series data analysis.

Software freedom doesn't just preserve your freedoms as the enduser or developer. It makes the software itself immortal.

As Linux users, we often install Linux for friends and family, but many struggle with updates, packaging quirks, and system maintenance—leaving you to fix issues and them frustrated.

Instead of simply suggesting they get a Chromebook, what if we could create a similar experience with NixOS? My Nixbook project delivers automatic updates, easy Flatpak app installs, and sane defaults for everyday users.

In this talk, I’ll share how I built it and made it work flawlessly.

Being the Compliance Manager of the Open Program Office of Hewlett Packard Enterprise (https://www.hpe.com/us/en/open-source.html) is the culmination of my prior lives as a computer programmer, lawyer and adjunct professor specializing in intellectual property subjects including open source. I'll discuss my start in computer programming and how I first became acquainted with open source along with the lessons I've learned along the way to maximize my impact in the Open Program Office at HPE.

A brief intro to the history and fundamentals of writing programs that communicate over a network. This talk provides basic background and examples so that attendees can experiment immediately and kickstart their own projects and tools.

Data lakes on open table formats like Iceberg are a popular way to manage large datasets for analytics, data science, and AI. This talk explains how data lakes work and how to adapt open source analytic stacks to use them. First, we'll tour projects like Arrow, Iceberg, and Unity Catalog that make data lakes possible. Next, we'll see how analytic engines like DuckDB, ClickHouse, and Spark are adapting. Finally, we'll survey a few projects that enable applications written in Python, Golang, or Rust to deliver fast query. You'll have to build the app yourself but this talk will show you a path to use data lakes and open source successfully.

Of all the ways we might evaluate a FOSS project, here is some logic behind how we can evaluate a group's or community's capacity to mobilize it's intellectual labour, and good judgment. With well pin-pointed areas of strengths and weaknesses, helpful interventions can be tailored to fit the real-life of a group in its current situation.

Over the past few decades, a rich ecosystem of open source hardware, programming environments, and server applications has grown to support rapid device development. With any device, user interaction is an all-important part of design. But the screens, lights, and buttons to support interaction are often the most intensive part of development. One strategy found in commercial devices is to pair with a richer device, such as a smartphone, for improved interactivity. Serial-config brings this kind of interaction to the open-source domain. From an abstract specification, it generates an embedded library, protocol, and a desktop or smartphone application binary for interacting with a tethered device.

Ada's Technical Bookstore will be selling books in the expo hall within the Husky Union Building (HUB).

Have you ever wanted to contribute to Nextcloud or develop a Nextcloud app, but do not necessarily have any experience with PHP? In this talk, we will share some recent developments that have been happening around Nextcloud in order to make the Nextcloud ecosystem more welcoming and accessible to developers of all skill levels and programming languages. In particular, we will introduce the new AppAPI framework, which enables the ability to produce "external apps" that can be written in any programming language (yes, really!), as well as provide some examples of such apps being used in production today. As one of the leading FLOSS alternatives to many of big tech's product offerings, Nextcloud needs you now more than ever!

Prepare for incidents with the AI Incident Response & Control (AIRCTL) Project maintainers. You will learn about AI risks, why preparedness matters, and incident response (IR) scenarios using FOSS resources.

We will guide you through how to run an in-person or virtual tabletop role-playing session using an AI-themed expansion to the game Backdoors and Breaches from Black Hills Information Security. All tools for gameplay and resources are included and FOSS.

Attendees will leave with all the practical skills needed to run a realistic tabletop IR exercise for safeguarding an organization using AI technology and for protecting research & development (R&D) assets. NO artificial intelligence or incident response experience needed!

Git is a major part of modern software development. It is the de facto open source version control platform, enabling developers worldwide to work concurrently without conflicts. Its robust branching and merging features facilitate both parallel development and efficient project management in a culture that encourages the use of Git as a universal tool for managing code in many varied settings and for adapting your dev process to fit its design. This talk will outline the TempleOS development environment, tips and tricks for writing software in the HolyC programming language, and how an operating system without a network stack can still follow modern development practices.

This talk addresses the issues that Linux has preventing it from being a mainstream option like Windows and macOS currently are, and the lessons I am taking away when building stillOS.

From plain-old Postgres to the LGTM stack, ELK, Cassandra, and ClickHouse, the landscape of telemetry storage options is as vast as it is overwhelming. With so many choices, how do we decide which datastore is right for the job?
In this talk, Joshua will guide attendees through the foundational principles of telemetry—covering metrics, traces, logs, profiles, and wide events—and break down the strengths and limitations of different database technologies for each use case.
We’ll examine how traditional relational databases like Postgres can still hold their own, where ELK and CockroachDB fit into the picture, and why specialized stacks like LGTM (Loki, Grafana, Tempo, Mimir) are so popular in modern observability pipelines. And, of course, w

SSH certificates improve both security and usability. No more TOFU (trust on first use) when you log in. Time-bound keys for access to limit the blast radius of a stolen or compromised key. We'll show how certificates are used and improve upon identity/pubkey authentication, and introduce several open source tools for managing them.

The International Code of Zoological Nomenclature is the protocol by which scientific names are validated and properly formed. It also is pretty broken. There are issues with grammatical agreement of species names, for one, and other issues with how names which are set by it differ because of different lists made by different people using different interpretations of the Code. Having conflicting names in your data makes life difficult. In this talk, I cover briefly how the Code works, and then I go on to discuss how to reconcile different taxonomies using Wikidata and code, so that you can know what bird or fish you're looking at when you're doing your research.

An overview of the backport automation and validation done on CentOS Stream kernel merge requests:
- what gets automatically backported?
- what checks are run?
- how do these changes end up in CentOS and Red Hat Enterprise Linux?

Observability is the ability to measure the current state of a system. Backend engineers are familiar with the 3 pillars of observability, and technologies such as OpenTelemetry that can be used to instrument applications and diagnose issues. Yet in the frontend world, we're behind the curve.

Join me as I dive into the tools and techniques we can use to instrument, monitor and diagnose issues in our frontend services. We'll cover RUM (Realtime User Monitoring) agents and the metrics and traces they provide, how to combine them with backend tracing for a full story path, and how this can be accomplished with a completely open source Observability platform.

Resist Tech Monopolies (RTM) is a collective that aims to build & support community alternatives to big tech. One of our projects is a self-hosted and distributed photo sharing application that will be an alternative to proprietary platforms like Google and iCloud Photos. Alternatives already exist; however, there are several barriers to more people adopting these tools, including cost of physical infrastructure, required tech skills, time and energy, and a lack of desired features. In this talk we present the case for resisting tech monopolies like Google Photos, go through the technical details of how we set up a community photo hosting platform, and share our lessons learned on the process.

High Level talk with the following topics

What is patch management / content management at scale ?

compliance as a service

metal as a Service

Some vendor options for patch management & ( baremetal & compliance as a service )

What are the os in your environment ?
What package management tooling ?
What is an errata ?
Why are there no security updates for most 3rd party repo ?

Multi Vendors OS pro&cons of software tooling ?

What 3rd party vendors embedded system is in your closet with an exception think deep packet inspection boxes / firewalls ?
Where are the sbom for these vendors ?

What is vendor embedded os running , arch linux , gentoo , etc .

What is your Env/Estate you need to defend 🛡️ ?

What compliance / governance regi

When you surf the web, there is a lot of stuff that goes on. When it works, which is most of the time, surfing the web is a joyous activity, unless you go to news sites. But when things go wrong, most browsers are not very helpful at diagnosing the problem.

In this presentation, I am going to describe browser failures in terms of what goes wrong at your end, what goes wrong at the server end, and what goes wrong in the middle. I will have some bash scripts to simulate problems on the client, on the server, and in the network.

I've been creating, performing, and touring several full length, high energy mime-inspired shows I describe as "Living Cartoons" for over 10 years at festivals around the USA. Happy to share different pieces or sections of shows, which have been made on shoestring budgets using open source software and open hardware for prop design: laser cutters, synthesizers, etc. You can also learn more about my fascination with DIY and fully open source tooling through my podcast Linux Prepper

In an era where data privacy and security are paramount, self-hosting an email server offers unmatched control, customization, and protection from third-party surveillance. "Your Email, Your Rules: Self-Hosting Simplified" empowers Debian GNU/Linux users by dispelling myths that self-hosting email is overly complex or impractical. Key topics include privacy through data ownership, server/VPS hardening, DNS records, server policies, autodiscovery, encrypted transmission and content, spam management with sieve, and Roundcube webmail. The presentation concludes by delimiting the approach’s scope and provides a roadmap for adjustments needed to scale to larger use cases.

You may already know that in Python, everything is an object. You may also have learned that type is the ur-type of everything. This is also true. But these two truths seem to be in conflict with one another. Which is the more fundamental thing of Python? Join me as I explore some of Python's most fundamental built-ins and try to reconcile this question. In the end you might see how Programming at large holds many dualities and paradoxes.

Join us for some refreshments and great conversation at Ada's Bookstore on Capitol Hill.

425 15th Ave E, Seattle, WA 98112

https://www.openstreetmap.org/?#map=19/47.622666/-122.313328

The Seattle Community Network is a volunteer-based, grassroots, nonprofit community ISP with a small operating budget (currently averaging $10-$50K in grants, donations, or in-kind contributions per year) that installs and provides internet access for homeless shelters; the services we provide to our users is critical infrastructure for their daily lives. This talk discusses some of the core operational challenges we face, the software infrastructure we use to meet those challenges, and its limitations.

Open Source is software, hardware, a community, a development methodology, a resource, a charity, a business, a philosophy, and more than the sum of its parts. This reflection on decades of engagement in free and open source software and open hardware mixes a dash of history with an ounce of hope for the future.

All infrastructure eventually hits its limits. Without timely migration, teams risk falling into tech debt—where upgrades feel daunting and change seems futile. Like homes that need constant touches and fixes, or a remodel long overdue, systems demand ongoing care, leaving teams hamster wheeling just to stay in place. A successful migration ends with a clear plan, a defined path, and strong execution—enabling services to evolve and stay relevant. This talk shares how one mature, distributed service transitioned from a fully managed to a serverless control plane—executed with zero downtime using low-risk, proven strategies.

Project Caua was launched to help students afford university by helping them to create their own company as a part time job using Free Software and Open Hardware with off-the-shelf components. All the profits go into the pockets of the people that do the work.

Democratic socialism at its finest, not one company with a million employees, but a million companies with one (or perhaps two) employees.

Do you need to search plain text files?

Do you have big files? Lots of tiny files?

How about inline searching of command output?

Introducing "grep"!!!

Find out if grep is the tool for you!

Watch as your fingers never leave your hands while you slice and dice plain text!

Be amazed as you quickly search through mountains of text to find what you're looking for.

But, wait, there's more.

There's an entire grep family of tools!

• egrep for advanced regular expressions
• fgrep to ditch the regular expressions
• rgrep to recursively search a filesystem

There are also the compression and archival cousins such as:

• bzgrep
• zgrep
• xzgrep
• ptargrep

Those family members also come as accessory command line switches.

Coop-cloud is a federation of tech cooperatives that builds shared cloud tools and democratically govern the maintenance and development of these tools.

The talk goes through coop-cloud's governing structure, what tools they developed (with some practical examples), and what are the challenges of this model.

As AI reshapes our digital interfaces, command lines aren't fading—they're evolving. This talk examines why CLIs remain essential in an AI-driven world and how the Model Context Protocol (MCP) represents their future. Drawing from my experience building AWS SAM CLI, I'll demonstrate how CLIs provide precision and composability that AI alone cannot match. MCP, an open protocol, creates a powerful bridge where AI can leverage CLI capabilities while preserving user control and privacy. Through live demonstrations, you'll witness a new paradigm where deterministic command lines and intuitive AI combine to create superior developer experiences, not the end of CLIs, but their renaissance.

In April 2011, I started writing a new implementation of the venerable pkg-config utility to improve its performance and usability called pkgconf. Users around the world now interact with pkgconf on a daily basis whenever they build software. Many lessons have been learned along the way. This talk is a combined retrospective as well as a look at future enhancements to the next major release series of pkgconf.

DiscoTech - Discovering Technology Fair

The integrity of software has become an increasingly critical concern in an era where digital systems underpin everything from financial transactions to critical infrastructure. Despite advancements in software security, a fundamental vulnerability still remains overlooked: the lack of verifiability in how open source software is constructed from its source code.

Friends, it's time once again to review the newest research findings about FLOSS. What's new in 2025? How are we continuing to thrive despite upheaval and AI slop? What works, what needs improvement, and what's changing? I'll give you a short tour through this year's most exciting findings.

As AI increasingly powers critical systems across industries, the quality and neutrality of training data have become central to model performance — and to model risk. This talk examines how biased datasets, often stemming from historical imbalances or sampling errors, propagate through machine learning pipelines and influence outcomes at scale. We’ll explore technical pathways through which bias infiltrates — from data labeling and feature selection to model optimization — and demonstrate how even small biases can magnify under automation. Drawing from real-world case studies, we’ll discuss frameworks for bias detection, debiasing techniques, and evaluation methodologies to build more robust, fair, and accountable AI systems.

Introduction to using OpenTofu as Infrastructure as Code for deploying server instances, databases, storage, kubernetes clusters to both cloud and on prem platforms

Join Adam's talk to learn how to stand up offline AI models for powerful and privacy-friendly advanced interactions with your own data. Chat with your documents, generate ideas, and pair with a virtual programmer. Take these techniques to the workplace to supercharge your business without sacrificing its data. Together we'll explore several methods for setting up models and interacting with them through both end-user and developer-level interfaces.

This presentation covers the differences between free software, open source software, and proprietary software. In short, it provides a broad overview of software licensing, its history, and the possibility for monetization for each software license.

the Anti-Meta Fedi Pact at https://fedipact.online/ is an organized effort to block Meta's Threads platform. it formed as soon as news of fediverse integration in a Meta product was leaked, and for a while was a campaign of preemptive defederation. this talk will delve into my personal reasons for starting the pact as well as those of others i have witnessed. it will talk about the history and experience of running such a project, how it has affected me and what i would do differently if i had the foresight of what i know now. it will expand on https://fedipact.online/why considerably :3

You're probably asking yourself what open-source software has to do with the US immigration system. As with all good technical questions, the answer is 'it depends'.

Personally, I've never found a technical problem that I won't at least try to solve with open-source software, so that's exactly what we did. Join me as I walk through the open-source workflow that my spouse and I used to wrangle the documentary requirements of the US immigration system.

GNU/Linux Loves All is a project that makes microtonal music accessible through FLO software. Microtonal means anything beyond 12edo (standard tuning). FLO stands for Free/Libre/Open. It means anything that respects and supports our Human Tech Rights. We can use FLO technology to be free to access the harmonic series and everything in between two notes.

This performance includes ancient notes from harmonics 3, 5, 7, 11, and higher. These tones from modern keyboards and violin are processed through FLO software on a GNU/Linux laptop.

I just moved to Seattle. I came from Los Angeles, a city of freelancers, whether by choice or necessity.
In Seattle, I've met lots of techies who are either unhappily unemployed or unhappily employed. Individually, most can’t build a consultancy or take on the risk of a startup.
But tech workers do collectively have the skills and resources to create more and better jobs for themselves. What if we treated job creation (tech and non-tech) as a community project, just like software creation?
I propose for Seattle a community-driven job-creation project based on the United Nations Open Source Principles. My thoughts draw on what the open-source community has learned about making software projects welcoming, scalable, and sustainable.

Open source software can be like a plate of mystery brownies in the breakroom: Where did they come from? Are they safe? Do they have gluten? SBOMs are your ingredient list for software, greatly reducing the risk of unknown components, open source licenses, and expired dependencies. This talk demystifies Software Bills of Materials (SBOMs) and security errata, showing how they empower individuals and teams to identify vulnerabilities, track end-of-life risks, and maintain compliance before incidents occur. Learn how SBOMs, advisories, and documentation work together to bring transparency to the Linux supply chain, keeping environments safe, resilient, and free from nasty surprises; just like you'd want for any food you consume.

Enjoy some refreshments and great conversation at Big Time Brewery located close to the University of Washington on the Ave.

4133 University Wy NE, Seattle, WA 98105

https://www.openstreetmap.org/?#map=19/47.657852/-122.313575