Bristol Anarchist Bookfair 2013

What we did

We spent an hour in The Room With A View giving the following whistle stop talk, including getting it, setting up chairs, table, projects and speaker, and then talking it all down again and exiting:

1. Intro to HacktionLab and TTFA (5 mins) - MikeH, https://hacktionlab.org & https://techtoolsforactivism.org
2. Schluze voting (10 mins) - BenG, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method
3. Econsensous (5 mins) - MikeH, https://econsensus.org/
4. Digital Currency / Mutual Credit Schemes (10 mins) - JohnC, OxCred - https://oxcred.org.uk/
5. A whistle-stop demo of Tor in action (5 mins) - MikeH, https://www.torproject.org - http://tortest.hacktionlab.org/
6. Oracle's take-over of Sun Microsystems (10 mins) - BenG, LibreOffice and MariaDB
7. Network23 (5 mins) - MikeH, https://network23.org & https://n-1.cc/g/hacktionlab
8. Barncamp (5 mins) - MikeH, https://barncamp.org.uk

Total = 55-60 mins

Resources

• Overall slides from event: Adobe PDF or LibreOffice ODP
• Mutual Credit Schemes slides: Adobe PDF or LibreOffice ODP
• Video about Volos and TEM mututal credit scheme: MP4 Video

Planning

These are the current picks for what we'd like to talk about.

Barncamp

We'll do a section on Barncamp, what is it, what we've achieved and how to get involved.

econsensus

https://econsensus.org/ - a system for consensus based decision making online. Make proposals, comment and vote on them.

Digital Local Currency Schemes

John C will come and talk for 20mins about network software that runs electronic-credit based local currency schemes. Like the LETS scheme brought into the 20th century.

Oracle's take over of Sun, 2 years on

Oracle, from a free software perspective at the least, are the archetypical evil corporation. They took over both hardware and software parts of Sun Microsystems on January 27, 2010. A shockwave of resignations and software forks proceeded. Sun owned a number pieces of widely used software including:

• MySQL - a database
• Java - a programming language
• OpenOffice.org - an office suite

Oracle have progressively closed the doors on these bits of software. We'll look at the free software movements response this, and what it means for the future.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_acquisition_by_Oracle

Schulze Voting

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method This is the fairest method of voting yet devised.

Talk would discuss:

• how is it fair?
• why we should use it.
• why we shouldn't use it.

Links:

• http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~legrand/rbvote/calc.html - various voting systems demo
• https://modernballots.com/ - Schulze STV demo
• http://wiki.electorama.com/wiki/Schulze_method - loads of details

bitcoins

A discussion of a new type of client: Electrum. Is it secure? Is it a good idea? What's happened in the bitcoin world since the last Bristol Anarchist Bookfair?

We would demonstrate a bitcoin transaction.

• http://electrum.org/
• http://www.bitvisitor.com/ - free bitcoins for us to play with
• http://bitcoin.org/

anarchy and free software

How is free software anarchist? To what degree does it kick frickin' ass? How are anarchy and free software linked? How should they be involved with each other?

tails

A look at the progress of The Amnesic Incognito Live System since last year's bookfair: https://tails.boum.org/