Hi all, here are some notes from the meetup today:

We went through making sure everybody had an Amazon EC2 instance they could access, then we installed mysql, created a database and user, then installed an admin tool, Adminer.

A list of ways IRC can be utilised to replace closed systems;

Game networks and friend lists

I was reading this reddit comment about developers moving away from Steam as a content delivery platform. It ended with the sentence:

I hope everyone loves having 6-10 logins, friends lists, etc. because that's the land we're in now.

If your privacy is in the hands of others alone, you don't have any.

The web is built on open standards and there are many ways to communicate freely and securely, but due to the proliferation of social media companies, almost no one outside of the geek communities seem to place the importance I do on controlling their own data and not being beholden to a proprietary, profit driven third party for their basic communication needs.

This is a account of how I'd like to see IRC used to bring together like minded communities in Glasgow in 2019 in video format.

I'll create some fictional channels/examples to illustrate what could be possible and show how users from different groups might interact.

Think free as in free speech, not free beer. Richard Stallman

When using the word 'free' in a sentence like "Free software is the future!", depending on the audience, I almost always worry I'm being misunderstood. An alternative way to phrase it is "Free and open-source software is the future!" but I see eyes glaze over immediately with that sentence.

It frustrates me when I see businesses or interest groups that focus their entire online presence on one platform that they don't control.

"Join our Facebook group to find out more!" or "Follow us on Twitter for updates!"

Over the past year or so I've seen comments decrying nonsense buzzwords for job titles like 'evangelist', 'guru', 'rockstar' etc. While I certainly agree that some of the titles I've seen are just awful, I've realised recently that I really do consider myself an evangelist (or an advocate) and I'd like to defend that title a little.

I've been aware of the job title 'advocate' for more than a decade - a friend of mine, Scott MacVicar, left Glasgow to move to the US and become an 'Open source advocate' - I thought that job title was a big step forward - I want nothing more than FOSS to be adopted and encouraged. Evangelist is basically the same thing, although I suppose it does have connotations with religion.

I've been meaning to start a new blog to record some notes on what I'm working on this year. I've got some ambitious plans so I might not have time to work on everything. Putting them here at least gives me a bit of a public todo list to work on.

Topic/post 1: Blog software. I wasted quite a bit of time looking for something good. I wanted: