[EdLUG] July Talk | Where's My Open Source Smartphone ?

[Tai Kedzierski]

Hi all,

TL;DR

* July's talk will be about the state of open source smartphones, by Thomas
Kluyver
* August , no meetup from me
* I'm looking for other venues. Again.
* We're on Meetup.com

+++
July Talk

https://opentechcalendar.co.uk/event/8611-wheres-my-open-smartphone

For July 2019, Thomas Kluyver will be giving us a rundown of the state of
open source smartphones!

When Apple launched the iPhone in 2007, phones completed a journey from
appliances to pocket computers. Over three quarters of adults in the UK own
a smartphone. But it’s difficult to run free, open source applications and
operating systems on your phone, or to get a phone with open hardware and
firmware. How open are the big smartphone platforms? What are the various
projects aiming to make our phones more open? And what are Purism doing
with the $2 million they raised by crowdfunding for the Librem 5?

Note ---- NEW VENUE

Special for this talk, we will be meeting at Akva - they have an accessible
venue (wheelchairs via a lift) with a mezzanine area suited for talks, with
a screen.

https://www.openstreetmap.org/search?query=Akva%2C%20Edinburgh#map=19/55.94318/-3.20833

Apologies for short notice, hopefully this will remain feasible for most
people.

+++
August

As per tradition/policy/habit, there is no "official" meetup in August.

I leave it open to whomever so wishes to organise something :-)

+++
Looking for new venues for the meetups

Since we started doing talks again, our attendance numbers doubled/tripled
compared to our no-talks meetups. My conservative estimate that we'd be
fine with Royal Dick for a while was way off the mark. We've also had
display problems due to a weak projector, and inability to darken the room
properly.

So for July's talk we are meeting at Akva, which I was able to get for free
; however if a commercial customer books the space for money, they would be
given immediate preference. I have been told that this is unliikely, but
not impossible.

My aim is to have somewhere for September that can roll for at least a
couple of years. It may be that we run with one of the original ideas,
which is to bounce until we settle... 2019 will definitely have been the
year of "searching for a home!"

+++
We're on Meetup.com

https://www.meetup.com/Edinburgh-Linux-User-Group-EdLUG/

I bit the bullet and created an account on Meetup.com as an exploratory
exercise. I hadn't planned on announcing it until after the summer when I
would be happy everything was properly set up, but people have already been
finding and joining it (including some names I definitely recognize!), so
the cat's pretty much out of the bag...

The rationale is that whilst long-established techies in Edinburgh know
about OpenTechCalendar, this only accounts for a small number of the
demographic. I'll always have a preference for OTC as the first place to
announce meetings, but I intend the Meetup.com page to be a way to
eventually reach newcomers to the local tech scene, and even non-technical
users.


Keep herdin' them penguins!

Tai

===
Tai Kedzierski
Linux Operations and Deployments Engineer


I use LibreOffice <https://www.libreoffice.org/> , a free,
Freedom-respecting replacement for MS Office

*Open Source Free Software is a matter of liberty, not price.*
https://www.fsf.org/about/what-is-free-software
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