Libre Graphics Meeting 2011 Montreal

LGM will this year happen in Canada. It is one of the great chances to meet so many of the graphics people out there from the major graphics projects. As more and more artists use libre graphics software the focus shifts from almost a mainly developer event in early years to a mix of artists, users, documentation writers, standardisation people and surely more roles. This gives a unique atmosphere to the event.

Typical the projects, which cover a wide range of graphics arts, will present their actual state and announce releases. There will be panels to envision the future of overall developments, to get in closer contact for collaboration projects and to propose or discuss new standards. There is always a reason for surprise.

With enough colour people meeting at LGM, there will be a OpenICC meeting to discuss topics around ICC style colour management in person. This is a good chance to get matters on the table and talk in person. Other colour discussions usually happen at various talks, workshops and so on. I will join this year again.

Dear reader, to make the event happen please consider funding travel and organisation. Many contributors from all over the world can not easily afford the costs for their hobby projects and must rely on your generous spent money to get there. A good chance is the pledgie champaign. The page covers as well links for sponsors:

LGM 2010

Libre Graphics Meeting in Brussels was a great event. The Oyranos project and a OpenICC meeting where a second time present. The last LGM for me was in Wroclaw two years ago, which was great as well.

This years organisation team managed the expectations very well. The location was really a place of inspiring creativity. The food where nice prepared north african dishes. I enjoyed the vegetarian mixture for these couple of days, as it tents to keep the head free and attention high.
The one track talks worked very well and we will enjoy the recordings of the whole track due to this session layout. The short presentations gave occasions for statements and many nice ideas. Surrounded by Birth of Feather (BoF) and workshops it was a nicely working mixture. And of course the discussions continue as well after LGM on public email lists and in private emails.

The colour management BoF took place on Friday. My notes for the OpenICC BoF session will go to the create and OpenICC email lists soon. We had a nice meeting around colour for the open source operating systems and desktops. Various projects where present like Scribus, Adobe, W3C, Ghostscript, Krita, GCM and Oyranos. The session served to inform and exchange with people around colour management concepts, directions and issues. Even if I had expected more projects to take part, I have seen great interest in colour around. Colour Management was considered as well in the OpenRaster BoF. There was a workshop around cameraRAW colour management and I learned in more detail how it works, which was very interesting.

The Blender project got really a financial impact and more projects target at gaining resources by turning their ideas into financial concepts. Thats a great sign, as it will allow to allocate more resources to the development of these open source projects. Blender had the great money collection to buy the code base for the project and release under a OSI license. Krita obtained much community sponsoring to pay now one developer for several months. Jon Philips talked about his commercial open source activities.
What I hope is that the mixture of various project concepts for the whole libre graphics development keeps open. Ending in a commercial mono culture just with open source strategies would not satisfy. What I really like in this community is the mixture of full time commitment and occasional contributions. There came many surprises to me by people, who seemingly have low commercial interests in their software, but seek ways to express their ideas and just want to evolve in this. I hope the mixture keeps alive as a base for a lively and creative spirit.

Many presentations where this year held by artists. That gave a very nice insight on how projects are driven by user demand. Just hire developers and let them implement, what users want, is a interesting concept. I am pretty sure this concept has limitations to complex software, but the directness of expression is amazing. It shows as well how users are actual enabled to implement their ideas by the means of existing technology. With future developments in web technology like HTML5, I expect to see more of that type of activities. A really great direction.

LGM 2010

Libre Graphics Meeting (LGM) May 27-30 in Brussels including Colour management and Oyranos.
Two colour management talks will start on Friday 28 May 2010 10:00 morning.



One talk will be about Oyranos a open source colour management system on system level. The following talk will present Ghostscript including its new colour management architecture.

Additionally is a round table for colour management planed. The later is not yet settled on which day and time.

Libre Graphics Meeting 2009 - Montreal

This years Libre Graphics Meeting will happen to be in Montreal from 6 to 9 may 2009. LGM is a major community organised event to bring open source graphic programmers and users together. On the last years meeting, I could meet many persons en face for the first time and discuss one of OpenICC’s Google Summer of Code projects. It was a great bazaar of exchanging ideas in a friendly atmosphere and I expect it to be a very helpful event this year too.

For giving you a chance to help in the success of the event, you can donate to cover part of the cost for the attending developers:
LGM 2009 Logo

LGM 2008

was for me a really impressive meeting. Really good was the talking on the OpenICC BoF and with other project workers face to face to more easily get a impression about, what are requirements and objections.

We met Carl Worth, and he and Behdad Esfahbod took the time to conceptually let coincide the colour and Cairo internals.

One interessting talk was given about spectral imaging in Krita. Really nice topic shared with the audience by Emanuele Tamponi.
Most talks are covered here.

Kamila Giedroj , Dave Neary, Louis Dejardins and all the other organisers made good preparations. It was a pleasure to attent. Thanks.

Libre Graphics Meeting 2008

The LGM happens to take place 8th to 11th may at the Wroclaw University of Technology. I am quite curious about the city and the people to meet there, most the first time in person. Even though we had sometimes contact some years before.
There are primarily three themes for me,

Of course other topics like tonemapping, a cross toolkit plug-in GUI API will be interessting to elaborate there as well. Talks in preparation for the Summer of Code projects like Colour Management near X are also promising to become interessting. Lets see what else.

For giving you a chance to help in the success of the event, you can donate to cover part of the cost for the attending developers.
LGM 2008 Logo

A sponsor contact page is here.