The months of October and November have been marked by many great Open Source events and opportunities to discuss with students interested in starting their professional journeys in tech. Also, we've enjoyed face-to-face debates, discussions, and questions and took the pulse of the tech market regarding Open Source.
PhD Talent
In October Diana, Ludovic, and Clément attended PhD Talent, an event meant to connect companies with PhD students, PhDs, and researchers to foster innovation. Attending this event has been a tradition for us since 2015 and we are happy that we could attend once again PhD Talent after the pandemic. Our XWikiers spent the day meeting with students at the stand and discussing the career opportunities available at the moment at XWiki and CryptPad. It is always a pleasure to see young people’s interest in Open Source and privacy.
Open Source Experience
Talks will be updated with videos when available.
We had the pleasure of attending the 2nd edition of Open Source Experience Paris on both days, where Ludovic, Jean-Sébastien, Arnaud, Stéphane, and Clément met and discussed at our stand with actors interested in XWiki and CryptPad.
This Open Source Experience edition was mainly focused on two major issues:
- Digital sovereignty and how Open Source can provide solutions for this issue;
- Financing Open Source.
This year we've also noticed a much greater interest overall in Open Source products and also in Confluence migrations. We also met our NextCloud and Passbolt friends during the conference and had the opportunity to discuss potential partnerships.
Clément Aubin - Shaping the future of knowledge management
This presentation has been based on the 17 years of experience of XWiki SAS in implementing wiki solutions. During this presentation, Clément showed different solutions related to structured content collaboration and also what are the plans for the next generation of XWiki content collaboration to complete the quality of the Open Source Digital Workplace offering.
Ludovic Dubost - Open Source Business Lab #6: Different strategies for publishing open source software
In a 10-minute presentation, Ludovic Dubost presented XWiki's open-source business model, commercial offering, monetization strategy, and licensing choices.
Ludovic Dubost as a Round Table moderator - Open Source: a strategic lever for European digital sovereignty
During the first day, Ludovic also moderated a Round Table discussion with experts from the digital ecosystem, user companies, and publishers on the importance of digital sovereignty and the contribution of Open Source to this issue, the role of communities, and digital commons.
Ludovic Dubost during a Round Table organized by OW2 - Risks and opportunities for European open source publishers facing IT giants
Does federating, as within the Euclidia alliance, or communities such as OW2 or Eclipse allow European OS publishers to resist better? How do publishers manage to adapt their business models? During this Round Table discussion, Ludovic together with other Open Source experts tackled the topic of risks and opportunities that European open-source vendors face in relation to IT giants.
FII IT-ist
On the 12th of November, we attended FII IT-ist, a Romanian educational event directed at students from the Faculty of Computer Science from Iasi. Our colleague, Marius, held a presentation about how we have implemented at XWiki the "Export as PDF" feature that converts multiple wiki (web) pages into a single PDF file. Our teammates Any, Stefana and Alexandra also held a booth and interacted with students of different study levels and discussed career opportunities inside XWiki.
CY Tech Forum
Another event we attended during which we interacted with students was the one at the CY Tech University in Paris that took place on November 17th. Ludovic and Clément have met with many students and, from what they've noticed, students are not yet aware of OSS and how it works. We are glad we had the chance to offer a crash course on the subject of Open Source to students. We've also encouraged students to make their own personal projects apart from school because they can also be improved over time and also be published on GitLab / Github.
Capitole du Libre
On the 19th and 20th of November Ludovic and Clément also attended Capitole du Libre, an Open Source community-based event. We’ve been thrilled to meet many individuals already using CryptPad either self-hosted or on cryptpad.fr. We can confidently say that it was really good to come back to Toulouse after two years of break due to the pandemic.
Ludovic Dubost - Financing your free software is possible!
Developing or participating in software in your free time or in a large company is one thing, but is it possible to become a full-time independent free software developer, to find the means to finance it while respecting your community and its users?
During this presentation, Ludovic shared with the audience the methods which made it possible to finance the free software XWiki and CryptPad within the framework of a small SME (XWiki SAS).
Clément Aubin - Document your projects without being tracked: open-source documentation tools respectful of privacy
Whether you are part of an association, a fablab, or whether it is simply a personal initiative, we all have a "side project": a small project outside of work, or school that is close to our hearts. When the project develops, there comes the time to talk about it and with that, to document it. In this presentation, Clément discussed the criteria for choosing a tool for the documentation of a project and also offered a list of Open Source tools that exist today, comparing their uses and their ease of use and administration.
Ludovic Dubost - Presentation of the CryptPad project, real-time editing, and end-to-end encrypted collaboration
Even though cloud services "promise" to keep your data secure, we don't actually control what is put in place to keep our data secure and our privacy secure. Many cloud services use our data to set up ad-based business models that read our data and pass it to advertising services. Others are more transparent, but struggle to effectively secure our data. However, another approach is possible! In this presentation, Ludovic Dubost presented CryptPad, an end-to-end encrypted collaboration solution.
CryptPad has been developed for more than 5 years now and is an end-to-end encrypted collaborative suite allowing the editing of multi-format documents in real-time. This platform integrates more than 8 types of documents including Office formats with import and export, a kanban, an HTML editor, a Markdown editor, a drawing tool, and a survey creation tool, as well as a Drive with shared folders. The tool also has an infrastructure for managing and sharing keys between users, all end-to-end encrypted to guarantee the strictest possible data confidentiality.
Campus du Libre
We’ve ended the month with Campus du Libre, a conference centered around FOSS and dedicated to the education of students from Lyon. Ludovic and Clement attended the event, shared knowledge on free software, and also had 2 talks focused on the financing of FOSS in the context of a small, ethical SME (XWiki SAS) and on how as a student you can document your projects with Open Source tools and what are the criteria for choosing the right one as well.