“The GNU Hackers' Meetings or ‘GHMs’ are a venue to discuss technical topics related to GNU and free software”, says the web site. And GHMs are in fact events structured as technical conferences, with presentation slides and all. But if we attend every year since 2007 or so, and organise, it is mostly for the fun of spending time with our GNU friends in a relaxed environment.
After many years in which GNU Hackers' Meetings took place in Europe for no particular reason other than we GHM regulars living in Europe, we opted to hold GHM 2022 in Turkey: https://www.gnu.org/ghm/2022/ . I organised the talks, schedule, web site and most of the remote communication with participants; Ege, a more practical person than I am who speaks the language and knows the region, dealt with the hotel and restaurants. She also proposed the dates and the place: October, when the weather is more comfortable; and İzmir, a large university city on the Mediterranean coast. Turkey has the advantage of being reasonably easy to reach not only from Europe but also from several countries in the Middle East, from which one can enter Turkey without a visa -- visas for Europe, on the other hand, are notoriously difficult to obtain from the Middle East. In fact since the beginning we were thinking about one specific friend and GNU contributor from Iran, that we would have really liked to finally meet in person. And then of course the main reason: reaching out to new people. Local people in Turkey who might see the announcement about a GNU meeting nearby and attend out of curiosity; and then maybe become friends, and contribute to some common project. In fact several people from İzmir reacted to my announcement with very enthusiastic emails, clearly excited. On the other hand few people from out of Turkey could attend in person even if there was interest, and we had to resort to some remote and pre-recorded presentations. Thanks to José Marchesi we could stream most of the event live, to a few tens of people. Ege and I arrived in İzmir two days in advance on Thursday September 29 in order to test the equipment at the venue; a very professional organisation. The following day we were joined by José, and then by a few early attendees for the pre-event dinner. There we had a surprise: two of the participants, which whom we had exchanged emails before, turned out to be extremely young: one fourteen, the other thirteen. Both with GNU/Linux on their laptops, speaking good English. They were not expert programmers yet, but wanted to learn. They turned out to understand free software very well already, and were in fact interested in free hardware. The next two days were for the conference itself. Of the attendees some were professionals, expert low-level programmers working on embedded systems; a couple of newly-enrolled students, about to begin their university careers --- one of them a Lisper, who asked very intelligent questions; and another who eventually found the courage of proposing to give a talk, and did. Awesome. We covered a table near the entrance with free software stickers for the attendees. Another table was holding name badges, each card prepared by me with my pathetically old laser printer and a cutter, slipped by hand into its plastic holder. If it was not as perfect as the hotel's flawlessly arranged snack tables at least one must concede that our hackish organisation was sincere. Sincerity is worth something. The event web page now contains most video recordings and presentations slides: https://www.gnu.org/ghm/2022/ A few more will come later. However recordings do not tell the whole story. Anybody interested is welcome to subscribe to the ghm-discuss mailing list https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/ghm-discuss , and join us next year. -- Luca Saiu * My personal web site: https://ageinghacker.net * GNU Jitter: https://www.gnu.org/software/jitter * GNU epsilon: https://www.gnu.org/software/epsilon I support everyone's freedom of mocking any opinion or belief, no matter how deeply held, with open disrespect and the same unrelented enthusiasm of a toddler who has just learned the word "poo".
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