Episode 5 of Free-as-in-Node is now available and ready to abduct even more of your time, now with even more ginger!  Listen in for some details on Ubuntu-1 from Stuart “aquarius” Langridge in Pimp My Project.  Ubuntu-1 sounds like an amazing new project.  Stuart gives us a tip to take a look at Ubuntu-1 without the wait, and gives us a few details on what he is up to and whats going on at Canonical.  He tells us about the ayatana mailing list, where discussion takes place on the interface and looks of Ubuntu.  We also find out about the new telepathic user interface Stuart is going to deliver to us… personally.

Christel tells us about the time travel fund, and the organization behind it.  For only $10 YOU too can sign up to be whisked away into time.  You’ll get it back with interest when they come back to take you away.  For $20 you can even go back to pick up your dead relatives.   Christel unfortunately vanished moments after signing up.

In this weeks political rant we hear about expenses filed by members of parliament for all sorts of things, from replacing light bulbs to pipes under their personal tennis courts.  It seems members of parliament are making use of this to furnish their homes, feed their families, and all sorts of other things. None of this is illegal, but is that because the people doing it are the ones making the laws?  Going on we hear all about the political views around the table and Christel hugging the queen.

Further on, we listen to the crew chatting about the way the world has changed and whats different now from the era of our grandparents.  No more leaving the door unlocked and coming home to tea.  Is the world more evil today than it was?

All in all, a much deeper episode delving into all sorts of things, and very entertaining.  Head on over to http://podcast.freenode.net to listen in!

The first annual SouthEast LinuxFest is coming up in just a few weeks, on June 13th.  This event is for anyone who wants to learn more about free and open source software, and is a combination educational conference and social gathering, all in one.  It looks to be a very exciting event.  Freenode will have at least one representative at the event and we are already aware of quite a few freenode users who will be there.

The event website is http://southeastlinuxfest.org, and you can also hop on irc.freenode.net and visit #southeastlinuxfest.

We really hope a few of you can make it in.  It really looks like it’s going to be a wonderful event. If you would like to join in, be sure to register on the site.  Hope to see you there!

After much worry about the weather (and possibly being thrown out of the park by park rangers), the Philadelphia Geeknic held yesterday, Sunday, April 19th, 2009, kicked off for a great day of fun in the (partial) sun, with food, fun, and geeks!  With about thirty people in attendance and plenty of food to go around, there was much to do.  Conversation centered around software, work, and harassing the “windows guy” while children played in the field.  Eventually a handful of geeks wandered off for a game of Frisbee at which they for the most part failed miserably. Despite the slightly cloudy day, the weather stayed mostly warm and comfortable.

Through a grave error, the geeknic cake was misplaced, thus ensuring that the cake was, in fact, a lie.  Fortunatly the selection of desserts did not suffer much from the missing cake, as there were plenty of treats to be found, including adorable ubuntu cupcakes.

All in all, everyone in attendance seemed to have a wonderful time, and we look ahead anxiously to the next Geeknic, in Dublin Ireland next month, and many others to follow!  We hope you can find your way to one or more of them.

If you would like to find out more, or see if there can be a Geeknic in your neck of the woods, send an email over to geeknic (at) geeknic (dot) org and the Geeknic team will see what they can do.

As we’ve mentioned in previous blog posts, pdpc, the parent organization that operates freenode, is very interested in offering more to the community.  To this end we’ve begun a number of other projects such as the new free-as-in-node podcastand “geeknics“, but this is just a small part of the level of involvement we aspire to.  We want to do more for the projects and users that use freenode every day, and for the community they represent.

With this in mind, you will be seeing one aspect of this here on the blog, as we make an effort to highlight events, projects, and people in the open source community.  You will see references to these here, much like the “pimp my project” section on our podcast, as we strive to bring attention to these well deserving events, projects, and people.  We would, of  course, love to hear from you about any of this, or anything you think deserves a mention, but meanwhile we will be seeking out those that we find interesting and mentioning them here.

Expect to see more in the near future promoting interesting and fun things, along with some more community focused projects from the pdpc and freenode.  We want to offer you and everyone in the open source community even more.  Stay tuned!

Jono Bacon, one of my friends and a FOSS contributor for which I have a lot of respect, known to many for his work as Ubuntu‘s Community Manager is one of the people behind arranging the Community Leadership Summit — a conference aimed at bringing people from various projects together to look at cross project collaboration and such things. The conference complements freenode and the PDPC’s Group Advisory Board very well and I for one shall be attending.

The goal is simple: if those passionate about building great communities can get together to compare notes and discuss and debate these topics, we will all benefit from better communities.

The summit gathers together community managers, leaders and organizers as well as the projects, organizations, commercial vendors, ISVs and others who have an interest in building a strong and enabled community. The purpose of the event is to get everyone together to talk about the many nuances of building strong and effective community, such as governance, creating collaborative environments, conflict resolution, transparency, open infrastructure, social networking, commercial investment in community, engineering vs. marketing approaches to community leadership and more.

You can read the rest of that over at Jono’s blog and of course, head over to the conference website, check it out and sign up if you can make it and it sounds like a good fit for you!

Jonathan mentioned in his blog post about the free-as-in-node podcast yesterday that this weeks guest on “Pimp My Project” was there to talk about PHP TestFest.

The TestFest is an event that aims at improving the code coverage of the test suite for the PHP language itself. As part of this event, local User Groups (UG) are invited to join the TestFest. These UGs can meet physically or come together virtually. The point however is that people network to learn together. Aside from being an opportunity for all of you to make friends with like minded people in your (virtual) community, it also will hopefully reduce the work load for the PHP.net mentors. All it takes is someone to organize a UG to spearhead the event and to get others involved in writing phpt tests. The submissions will then be reviewed by members of php.net before getting included in the official test suite.

As per http://qa.php.net/testfest.php Head over there if you want some more information on how to get involved!

We are happy to announce that we have in fact reached our 2008/2009 fund raising goals, and as such are no longer in danger of losing charity status.  At present, we have exceeded the required amount (£5,000) by at least £200 and we here are all very excited (and relieved) to have accomplished this with your help.  We would like to offer our thanks to each and every one of you who helped out and contributed.  This truly shows just the sort of thing the community is capable of.  We’d also like to offer thanks Canonical in particular for their help in reaching our goal through their matching of £1,700 of donations by others.

We appreciate all of your help, and as always, thank you for using freenode.

We are proud to announce our very first episode of our very first season of free-as-in-node, the new freenode podcast. Now you can let IRC waste your life even when you can’t be online!  The purpose is simple: entertain, inform, and interact, just like IRC. Via the podcast we will be bringing you guests and information from all over the freenode community.

Visit http://podcast.freenode.net/  for more information.