Hi,
intrigeri:
> sajolida:
>> In general, linking our presentation with work that might be most of
>> interest to Mozilla or that we might ask them to support sounds like a
>> good strategy to me; but not necessarily the only one of course.
> Absolutely.
I'm coming back to this topic as the deadline is at the end of the
month, and the last minute I can work on this is tomorrow (Sunday).
The call for proposals says "Successful sessions are not lectures or
presentations with slides, but are designed to challenge and encourage
audience participation", which I hadn't noticed before. It gave me
food for thought.
Among what was proposed already on this thread, I think what would
most easily fit in this format is one of Ulrike's ideas: "Contribute
to Tails session (hands-on)". So I say if you want to propose and
facilitate it, please go ahead. I'm personally not very motivated to
facilitate this session there.
OTOH it doesn't fit into the strategy sajolida proposed (quoted
above). Personally this strategy is what motivates me most to
facilitate a session there, so I see two options as far as I am
concerned: either try to spin our (past & future) work on reproducible
builds in a way that fits the format, which is going to be hard but
I have a few ideas; or drop the ball and attend the event, if I can,
without facilitating any session (and thus without a travel stipend
from Mozilla).
So far my best idea wrt. reproducible builds is to be much more
general that "how we made the Tails ISO reproducible", and use our own
use case as a mere example. There's lots of material ready to be used
about why reproducible builds matter, and I have some ideas on top of
that (e.g. the "I want software to do what I agreed it to do" angle,
from the perspective of *consent* applied to technology, and why Free
Software alone is not enough to allow me to give my informed consent).
There's also a lot of material ready to be used about how to make
software build reproducibly, and our own experience can illustrate
this just fine. So I think we (e.g. myself and/or Ulrike) have the
resources to facilitate a nice interactive session about this topic.
It'll require non-negligible upfront preparation work though, e.g.
looking at
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=885777 in
depth and ensuring we have an up-to-date understanding of the
blockers: I assume that some attendees will be interested in "why
isn't Firefox not reproducible?" (while Tor Browser is) in this
context. I don't believe in making this session not-too-technical
given the power imbalance between users and developers (that's
possibly even greater in FOSS than in proprietary software, actually):
even if we convinced users that they need/want reproducible builds,
this would not change the world at all; instead, we need to convince
developers and management to prioritize this.
I'm still thinking about this, and I don't know yet if I'll try to
write down this proposal tomorrow or not. I would appreciate feedback,
input, and opinions. Worst case I'll drop the ball and try to attend
the event like most attendees, without facilitating any session, and
it'll be just fine :)
Cheers,
--
intrigeri
