fizzPOP socials
I mentioned in a previous post how I wanted to get more people doing social things that related to hacking, like going to the Micromouse event last Saturday. I thought it’d be a great opportunity for people to see what else is available to the community and to link different micro communities that would eventually encourage more discussion and collaboration between the groups. Well, it looks like I’m not the only one with that idea. Several members of the group have been rather vocal on making the meetings more than fortnightly. My only concern with a move like that is that there’s a risk of exhaustion and people may feel under too much pressure to come. This is why I liked the suggestion of one member to have social meets in between the hacking sessions. In this way discussion can still continue and it may be a great way for new members to get better acquainted to other members.
Now the next task is to seek out of technical events in the West Midlands that we could go to and also to just chill over brew! If people interested in attending a social next week have a preference over day vote here
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FLOSS+Art
On Thursday 11th June I gave a presentation about Open Source Software and its relationship to open source software. You can watch a video of it here, or download my slides. There’s lots of information in the notes so be sure to check.
In general I covered the usual things including what programs there are availble to facilitate creativity. One thing I wanted to emphasise was the need for more collaboration between coders and artists/non-coders.
What makes many of the open source creative programs so powerful is their extensibility. In many of the programs have a scripting environment where plugins can be written, often in Python, that can do many things, such as batch processing, modifying an image in real time or just about anything that the programmer can imagine. A problem that we (the open source community) face is that not everyone is a coder. So, they may see the scripting environment as a drawback instead of a feature.
So, I think there needs to be more education about the capabilities of the software and demonstrating of what can be achieved by learning programming and understanding more about your tools.