Join NSA Whistleblower Edward Snowden and ACLU Technologist Daniel Kahn Gillmor for a discussion about free software, surveillance, power, and control of the future.

Your workplace can exert a lot of control over how much free software you use, what you're allowed to work on in your own time and what kinds of tools you become an expert in. New employees don't always negotiate their contracts to make sure they can continue contributing to free software and current employees aren't always successful at advocating for using free software tools, choosing free software technologies or contributing changes back upstream when they do rely on free software. We'll address what's possible, what your legal department is likely to be concerned about and how to be a smooth negotiator at work. Many companies could benefit tremendously from using Free and Open Source Software, but free software enthusiasts and institutional gatekeepers are coming from very different perspectives. Free software developers and users tend to be most familiar with free software's benefits when compared to proprietary solutions; user freedom, reusing code, public code review for bugs, increased project capacity and cost. The uninitiated may -- unfortunately -- be most familiar with the risks, some real and some perceived. Employers also benefit from having workers who are passionate about their work, are well-connected to the free software community and are constantly learning about new technologies from their peers outside the company, but new employee contracts rarely recognize this unless you ask. Conversations about contracts, choosing new technologies and sharing an employee's work with another entity are high stakes negotiations. With a solid understanding of what worries and motivates the other parties, you can become a savvy advocate for free software at work. This talk will help you gather information, frame the conversation and make the best possible case for using and contributing to free software at work.

Shifting perspectives on the value of Free/Libre software development and Creative Commons content creation would open up opportunities for individuals working in these fields as we finally see a push towards an economy that makes sense for the Internet. This will be an overview of some platforms creating these new opportunities and ways we can think about how an economy can exist in the digital world beyond the artificial scarcity that comes with keeping code and content locked down or secret. The session should include group discussion about platforms, philosophies and experiences folks working in free/libre software and creative commons content.

An 'intermediate' panel designed to provide a working overview of diversified libre media communities blended with per-project technical development updates, organizational adoption challenges, community-centric user-experience goals and other novel discussions regarding video production both generally and as it relates to conference video production (e.g., session recording and live-streaming).

The license compliance industry purportedly helps information technology companies and other actors to use publicly available software, and in particular free software, in a way that is compliant with the relevant free software licenses. In this talk we will review why the license compliance industry exists and discuss, from an external point of view, how it operates. We will then highlight some potential ethical issues on the current best practices for license compliance in the industry, and propose community-oriented alternatives that we can build, today, on top of the existing corpus of publicly available free software.

This strategic action session is for anyone interested in the solidarity economy and asset-based community development. We'll compare notes, network, and outline the ecosystem of services needed to support the operations of community land trusts, worker co-operatives, sharing networks, and other democratic economic initiatives. We'll also explore how open source technology can help activists organize and manage investments, alliances, and information resources. Hopefully both hardware and software solutions will be discussed. I'll facilitate the session and am open to the "unconference" style, where the content of the session is decided by whoever shows up. I'll prepare an overview of the topic, with an emphasis on designing tactics for people without a background in technology. Security, control, and sustainability will be core concepts.

The full potential of free software is to break down the barriers to technology and to participation, and to include users and contributors from a wide range of backgrounds. There are four key steps for making communities diverse and inclusive: creating a welcoming environment, teaching skills, fostering connections, and increasing visibility of contributors from underrepresented backgrounds. Whether you are a prospective contributor wondering what an inclusive community looks like, a project contributor wanting to take concrete steps to improve your project's outreach, or a project leader looking to create a diversity strategy for your community, this talk will have the information you need. Marina will share best practices and inspiring stories from her years of experience in free software diversity outreach in roles including outreach specialist at Red Hat, co-organizer of Outreachy, advisor and director for the Ada Initiative, and outreach lead for GNOME.

Modern websites incorporate large amounts of third party resources. While these third parties can provide a better browsing experience all too often they abuse their inclusion on sites to be able to track information about your website's visitors. This type of non-consensual tracking must stop.

I'll cover how users can protect themselves while browsing, why some solutions are better than others, and why free software licenses have helped provide a rich ecosystem of non-proprietary tools. From Ad Block Plus, to Firefox's Tracking Protection, to the EFFs Privacy Badger extension I'll discuss how these tools work and how users can protect themselves from online surveillance.

Projects with a significant number of contributors and users will face decisions where they are no longer able to fulfill the needs and desires of all stakeholders. When this happens some people become upset. A subset of those people become so upset they vent their frustrations on Twitter. I have collected tweets that express a negative sentiment towards decisions made within free software communities and by decision makers for free software projects. These were then categorized based on the decision type (e.g. licensing) and outcome (e.g. switching licenses). I hope to create a greater community understanding of decision making processes, develop a discussion about how communities and decision makers can move forward to better balance the wants and needs of stakeholders, and make a few crass jokes that possibly violate the Code of Conduct.

Project "De-google-ify Internet" aims at offering as many alternative services as possible to those threatening our digital freedoms. Google" is not the only player there, even though it gave the project its name. Google Drive, Google Calendar, Skype, Dropbox, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Doodle, Yahoo Groups, and many others, are extremely convenient services. But they are centralized and make users dependent.

Framasoft are resisting this trend. They have come up with a several year roadmap to set up alternative services. These services are thought of as digital commons. They are free, gratis, and open to all. Framasoft is a French not-for-profit whose goal is to decentralize the Internet by promoting self-hosting. They work to empower everyone to install and run their own services. The project already offers more than 15 alternative services and welcomes about 1,000,000 visits per month.

A look back at free software history, with a live demonstration of software from the past being used to deliver a presentation in 2016.

Academic Institutions and their researchers are some of the biggest beneficiaries of free software development. While individual researchers have contributed greatly to free software, they usually do so outside of the scope of their regular jobs and to the detriment of their academic careers. At CUNY, we have taken steps to change this unacceptable situation. Please come to this session and exchange ideas and strategies for having contribtions to free software valued by the University.

Being a free software user isn't easy, especially when you're a college student. I spent a year at a school that taught Visual Basic as its primary programming language for freshmen and sophomores, where "Introduction to Programming" was an overview of the Windows OS, and where most of the professors would only accept papers typed in Times New Roman -- and I survived. In this session, I'll give students tips for making it through college while still adhering to the values we hold as free software users -- including alternative fonts, making a GNU/Linux live disk for use on public computers, avoiding the "Netflix and Chill" dilemma, and most importantly, ways to discuss free software with professors and fellow students. After leaving this session, students will feel empowered and able to hold their own as free users in a proprietary campus.

The MAME Project's main stated goal is to preserve historical computer hardware. The strategy for achieving that objective is to inspect the devices and then to develop emulators for them. While most hardware is undocumented and relies on proprietary firmware, the MAME development community has nurtured strong reverse engineering practices since its origins back in 1997.

The techniques that we need to master in order to develop new emulators include reverse engineering procedures that are also very useful for aiding in the creation of free firmware solutions to replace the non-free blobs used in a broad variety of daily-use devices. These skills are also useful for the development of free drivers for undocumented devices and in the porting of operating systems and BIOSes to new hardware platforms. We need to strengthen a community of skillful hardware reverse engineers so that we can solve the freedom issues denounced by projects such as Linux-Libre and Libreboot.

LittleSis is a free software, wiki-style database that tracks connections between the world's most powerful people and organizations. In the workshop, participants will be trained in the site's basic functions (e.g. editing profile pages and searching for interlocks between corporations) and advanced functions (e.g using the site's Oligrapher tool to create maps of information stored in the database). We will also share stories about the ways in which LittleSis and power analysis research have been used in movement and organizing contexts, including how activists in St. Louis used LittleSis to map and challenge the local corporate Powers Behind the Police and how activists in Philadelphia are using LittleSis to research the corporate entities behind education privatization. Participants will leave with an understanding of how to use LittleSis, as well as inspiration for how they can start their own movement research teams to map the powers that be in their communities.

Loomio is free software that we created after experiencing the transformative potential of participatory decision making, and its limitations, during the Occupy movement in New Zealand. Scaling is impossible if people have to be in the same place at the same time so we developed software that allows online groups to be inclusive and fast, enabling deliberative discussion that taps the collective intelligence of the group while moving actively to shared agreement and action. Loomio is free to maximize access and inclusion, knowing that people who are on the margins of power are the least likely to have a voice. This session will engage participants in how Loomio works -- in fact they can sign up ahead of time to inform the session! I'll share lessons and challenges from cases across the 95 countries where citizen activists and workers are experimenting with better, fast platforms to collaborate. Participants will be inspired to use Loomio to support their groups.

Imagine a world where surveillance is the default and users must opt-in to privacy. Imagine that your every action is logged and analyzed to learn how you behave, what your interests are, and what you might do next. Imagine that, even on your fully free operating system, proprietary software is automatically downloaded and run not only without your consent, but often without your knowledge. In this world, even free software cannot be easily modified, shared, or replaced. In many cases, you might not even be in control of your own computing -- your actions and your data might be in control by a remote entity, and only they decide what you are and are not allowed to do.

This may sound dystopian, but this is the world you're living in right now. The Web today is an increasingly hostile, freedom-denying place that propagates to nearly every aspect of the average users' lives -- from their PCs to their phones, to their TVs and beyond. But before we can stand up and demand back our freedoms, we must understand what we're being robbed of, how it's being done, and what can (or can't) be done to stop it.

By sheer luck and opportunity, a group of four doctors in 2004 at a restaurant used napkins to sketch the data model of what they thought would be a simple electronic medical records system.

Fast track to today, this simple medical records system is known as OpenMRS (Open Medical Record System), a free medical records system in use in over 42 countries in the world. For example, when Google worked on the ‘Ebola tablet’ under project Buendia, OpenMRS powered it. After the national disaster in Haiti struck, OpenMRS powered the new Mirebalais hospital. Six countries committed to deploy OpenMRS as their national EMR system including Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Nigeria, Philippines and Bangladesh. OpenMRS has never hired developers for the decade of existence, yet every single day people from all over the world come to our platform and ask us how can they get involved?

This session shares a decade of running a lean organization to provide free medical records software, what has worked and what threatens our sustainability.

In fiction, we have often faced our fear that man-made creatures will become smart enough to subjugate us. As technology evolves, the Singularity may seem an inevitable looming future, but such intelligent beings have actually been with us for a very long time. Over many decades, they disabled the checks intended to keep them under our control, and turned most of us into their much-needed servants, who now live in an artificial reality they created to control us, while our planet can hardly support our life much longer. These creatures grew more powerful and smarter with our technological advances, but then they sent their agents back to disable our defenses and the leaders of our resistance, turning many of our tools and much of our infrastructure against us. They vaporized our freedoms, and a dark cloud now covers most of the planet. We still have one card left up our sleeves to tame these creatures, but we need more Neos and Connors to play it successfully. Are you up for it?

User freedom is threatened by the growing complexity of current deployment and packaging directions. Running software (especially server/networked software) is becoming too hard for the average user, so many users are turning to the dangerous path of relying on large corporations to do their computing for them. What can GNU do to turn the tide here? Enter GNU Guix and GuixSD! This talk will walk through Guix's unique positioning to provide totally free and reproducible systems. A path will be laid out on how Guix could be used as a foundation for easy to run and maintain computing for everyone, how you can get Guix and GuixSD running, and how to get involved in the most hacking-friendly package manager/distro duo ever!

The surveillance state is driven by secrecy. But everything leaves a data trail and the intelligence community itself is no exception -- even the NSA is vulnerable to surveillance. Transparency Toolkit is a free software project that helps anyone investigate surveillance programs.

By making tools to help collect and analyze publicly available data like resumes, job listings, social media, and government contracts, we are using free software and open data to track and expose the surveillance state. In this talk, I'll discuss some of the interesting things we've found, how Transparency Toolkit's software works, and how people can use our tools to investigate issues they care about.

The free software movement has done well in the last few years, and has even inspired a new generation of activists advocating for software freedom. However, in a software-driven society where everything from cars, watches, and even medical devices run on non-free software, the free software community has its work cut out for it. In order to enact significant social change, we need to work with legislators, other activists, and local community leaders. Their help is crucial.

How do we connect our community to other groups? In order to gain support, the first step we must take is to engage with the public on how non-free software can affect their everyday lives negatively. Even the most non-technical person can become engaged with the social and technical benefits to free software, if given the chance. This session will discuss how each and every one of us in the free software movement can engage with others, promoting the ideals of a society running on free software in a way that each person can personally appreciate.

What could possibly make thousands of free software advocates, ham radio operators, researchers and physicians stand together? One obscure FCC rulemaking proposal on wireless radios. Eric Schultz, one of the leaders of the Save Wifi Initiative, discusses the details of the extreme proposals of FCC to control how you use your devices. You'll learn the history of regulators quietly locking down wireless radios and how it's unintentionally extending to a lockdown of the operating systems of devices. Finally, you'll find out some of the problems with proposed workarounds for the the FCC lock down proposals.