Beijing, Tuesday, March 22, 2011

The Mozilla Drumbeat Hackfest is coming to Beijing. The 2011 China Drumbeat is organized around the theme of citizen science on the web, and has attracted some of the world’s leading developers in this field to participate. The Hackfest takes place from March 23 – 25, 2011 and is to be hosted at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing.

The goal the 2011 China Mozilla Drumbeat is to increase public awareness of citizen science on the web, and partner open source developers with the scientific community to build prototypes and solutions for “citizen cyberscience” in China. The Hackfest is for web developers, mobile app developers, processor enthusiasts, online game developers and virtual world enthusiasts.

The first night of China Mozilla Drumbeat Hackfest, Wednesday March 23, Mozilla is hosting a Firefox 4 Release Party from 9:30 until 11:30 at the Rainbow Club. It is a night of fun, music and celebration for the global launch around the world of the most free, open and secure web browser, Mozilla Firefox. This is a free and open event, but registration is required prior:
http://mozilla.com.cn/event/25-ff4-launch-party/

The main two days of the Hackfest on March 22 – 23 are focused on “citizen cyberscience” which includes volunteer computing projects such as SETI@home, BOINC, CAS@home, and LHC@home. These projects all leverage the power of distributed computing to aid basic scientific research.

A Drumbeat Hackfest is a live collaborative event where tools and technologies that support the open web are designed and created. The 2011 China Drumbeat welcomes the participation of developers with skills in HTML, CSS, JavaScript, data visualization, distributed computing, mobile computing and online gaming. Participating developers can take advantage of this opportunity to aid the scientific community and increase public uptake of volunteer computing using the latest in web technologies.

The Hackfest opens on March 23, 2011 with an evening of speeches by Francois Grey, Coordinator of the Citizen Cyberscience Centre and initiator of the Africa@home and Asia@home citizen cyberscience projects; as well as team leaders from SETI@home, BOINC, CAS@home, LHC@home, EpiCollect, the Quake Catcher Network Project, and the Computing for Clean Water Project. Fabricatorz Christopher Adams and Jon Phillps are also in Beijing supporting and hacking at the event with the teams and creating news.

March 24 and 25 will see full-day hackfest sessions with scientists and developers to take on new challenges and help enhance volunteer computing through rapid software and product prototyping.

The Fabricatorz are proud to be participating and supporting this event. Christopher Adams and Jon Phillips will be the master of ceremonies at the Firefox Release Party. We hope to see you there!

About China Mozilla Drumbeat Hackfest

More Information in English and Chinese:

• http://mozilla.com.cn/event/23-drumbeat-en/
• http://mozilla.com.cn/event/24-drumbeat-cn/

About Firefox 4 Release Party

http://mozilla.com.cn/event/25-ff4-launch-party/

Rainbow Bar
彩虹轩酒吧

Address:
B1, Tower C, Science Plaza, Tsing hua Science Park, Wu Dao Kou
北京市海淀区清华科技园科技大厦C座地下一层

UPDATE: So many people have registered, so we had to get a bigger venue! Please take note!

Wen Jin Hotel B1, Chamber bar (The hotel is close to Tsing Hua South Gate.)
北京市海淀区中关村东路一号清华科技园文津国际酒店地下一层璨酒吧（文津酒店
在清华南门旁边）

About Mozilla Drumbeat

Drumbeat is a global community of innovators like you, building a more awesome web and world. Connect with others. Find projects that need your help. Or share your own. https://www.drumbeat.org/

About Fabricatorz

The Fabricatorz is a “open” production company that makes successful projects from start to finish, including development and community management. We specialize in Free and Open Source Software, Creative Commons technology, growing on-line and off-line communities in San Francisco, China and the Arab World. We develop software with Aiki Framework, hardware using Qi Hardware, and build communities around the philosophies of Sharism.

http://fabricatorz.com/

Press Contact

• Jon Phillips
• press@fabricatorz.com
• Global +1-415-830-8334
• China +86-187-1003-9974

Cutting edge creative tools meet free culture

May 10-13, Ecole Polytechnique Engineering School

Programmers and artists from around the world are headed to Montreal for the 6th annual Libre Graphics Meeting in May. The Libre Graphics Meeting is an annual gathering for the users and developers of free and open source creative software: artistic tools that are free for anyone to use and modify. LGM gives software developers, artists, musicians, designers and other creative professionals the opportunity to collaborate, share their work and learn from each other.

A Preview

Every year, Libre Graphics Meeting focuses on individual and group interaction, emphasizing free media and the software that produces it. This year’s attendees can expect a similar format that will include workshops, presentations, demonstrations, and birds-of-a-feather (BOF) sessions. Leading up to the conference, special lab sessions bring developers and artists face-to-face to make improvements in creative software. Gaps can form when developers and their users don’t meet face to face; LGM gives artists and educators a voice in the building of their tools. Both content creators and developers will present, bringing a diverse community together to advance the technologies and strategies of high-quality free creative software.

Submit a talk!

LGM’s strength comes from the presenters who talk about their work and inspire others by sharing their experiences, techniques, and best practices. Whether you are a developer, an artist, or an enthusiast, you can be a part of this year’s event by sharing your story and your work.

The LGM community wants to hear your proposal for a session. Submit your idea any time between now and April 1, 2011 by visiting http://create.freedesktop.org/wiki/Conference_2011/Submit_Talk

Topics of interest include: development of the applications, color standards and color management, designer and developer collaboration, web services, workflow, exchange between floss and artists, power-user techniques, and graphics business best practices.

• Proposals should have a title
• Describe your proposal in at most two paragraphs
• Include a short bio & contact informations
• Include any special technical setup you require other than radio-microphone, beamer, laser pointer, computer, network
• Talks are 30 minutes including Q&A and setup.
• Lightning talks are 5 minutes
• Tell us if you have specific date & time constraint to present your talk
• Tell us if your trip to LGM is already sponsored or if you need help from LGM to get to Montreal. In the last case, please evaluate your needs (cost of economy plane ticket for the round trip, for instance).

Help keep LGM free

Libre Graphics Meeting is an invaluable meeting ground for industry leaders and end users alike. It has also been free of charge since the very beginning — but as the open source community continues to expand, attendance keeps increasing.

Your support is a vital means for the continued success of LGM, whether you are a readers, an attendee, or simply a fan of free graphics software. Click here to make a donation: http://pledgie.com/campaigns/14610

Highlights from LGM 2010

Last year’s Libre Graphics Meeting, the fifth since the project’s inception, took place in Brussels and was highlighted by important work on open color management systems and data interchange formats. The vector graphics standard file format, SVG, headlined many of the the discussions and interaction that took place, as it has become an integral element in communicating freely created content through websites and printed pieces. All major projects represented at LGM 2010 — Scribus, Gimp, Inkscape, and Open Font Library — spent time planning activities for the months and years ahead. Other hot topics in presentations and discussions included Blender, Krita, Open Web Graphics and Services, Python, Rawstudio, and many more.

Continuing with the success of recent LGM incarnations, more attention was given to the rising numbers of professional graphics users and youth attendees. In fact, of the 51 sessions held during the 4 day extravaganza, 20 were given by creative professionals. Specific workshops were organized to engage students from art and design schools around the world. [http://lwn.net/Articles/390572/ Nathan Willis] writes of one such event:

”Denis Jacquerye, widely known from his work with the DejaVu fonts, discussed font design and features for African languages, encouraging the community to build more such fonts.”

About the Libre Graphics Meeting

The Libre Graphics Meeting exists to unite and accelerate the efforts behind Free, Libre and Open Source creative software. Organised by volunteers from the international Libre Graphics Community since 2006, this annual meeting is the premiere conference for developers, users and supporters of projects such as GIMP (http://www.gimp.org/), Inkscape (http://www.inkscape.org/), Blender (http://www.blender.org/), Krita (http://koffice.org/krita/), Scribus (http://www.scribus.net/), Hugin (http://hugin.sourceforge.net/), the Open Clipart Library (http://www.openclipart.org/), and the Open Font Library (http://www.openfontlibrary.org/). At LGM, teams gather to work on interoperability, shared standards, and new ideas. Work at prior LGMs has pushed the state of the art in important areas such as color management, cross-application sharing of assets, and common formats.

For More Information

For more information, visit http://www.libregraphicsmeeting.org

Get involved by joining the Create mailinglist (http://create.freedesktop.org) or propose a talk via http://create.freedesktop.org/wiki/Conference_2011/Submit_Talk

—-

”LGM 2011 is hosted by the [http://create.freedesktop.org Libre Graphics Community] and Polytechnique”

Press Contact

• Sponsoring Organization: Libre Graphics Meeting and Create Project.
• Contact: Jon Phillips
• Contact email: jon@fabricatorz.com
• Phone (USA): +1.415.830.3884
• Website: http://libregraphicsmeeting.org/
• Pledgie campaign: http://pledgie.com/campaigns/14610
• Photos: http://ur1.ca/a34y

Organization Contact

• Contact: Louis Desjardins
• Contact email: louis.desjardins@gmail.com
• Phone (MONTREAL): +1.514.994.9351

Today, the Fabricatorz announced the Release of Aiki Framework 0.8, an ultra-fast and intuitive open web development framework that serves as the foundation for much of our finest work. The Announcement highlights many notable improvements to the software:

Helping to further bridge the gap between development and live site results, an SQL Query test box has been added to the top of Aiki’s Admin interface. Here, site architects can run database queries and test their results before committing code to a widget.

To learn more about how Aiki Framework can increase your web productivity, have a look at the Official Press Release and download the software.