Digital concept

Grazer Linuxtage is a local gathering of friends of free/libre/open source software and hardware. As such, this event has taken place locally and people met to discuss topics on-site. We are committed to this concept and want to make it happen again… but in 2022, this year. The ongoing pandemic makes it impossible for us to guarantee the safety of our participants on-site now. Therefore, GLT21 is going to happen online.

How and when?

Grazer Linuxtage 2021 (#glt21) are going to happen on the 9th and 10th of April 2021 (Fri+Sat). As usual, Friday is designated for workshops and Saturday will be reserved for talks. Sadly, we couldn’t come up with an appropriate concept for info booths, hence they will not be a part of our program in 2021. The Call for Participation starts on 2020-12-22 and ends on 2021-02-05.

Hard facts

  • There are going to be up to 3 talks in parallel (reminder: in 2019 we had up to 6 talks in parallel).
  • Speakers can present live with slides, submit a pre-recorded talk, workshops, or pre-recorded lightning talks:
    • Speakers are required to be available during their time slot and the following 20 minutes (for questions). They mainly need to be online in the chat.
    • We have a limited budget to buy hardware in order to support speakers without appropriate setup. Please answer the question in pretalx appropriately if you need hardware support.
    • All submissions are welcome in German or English.
    • Regarding live talks with slides:
      • Live presentations require some WebRTC-enabled browser (i.e. any modern browser), some microphone and some webcam. We will use Jitsi or BigBlueButton as interface.
      • Live presentations can only happen with PDF slides. Those slides need to be submitted on the day before (i.e. 2021-04-09T08:00), because they need to be prerendered by our setup.
      • Live presentations can therefore not include e.g. demonstrations on a CLI. Also, switching between recordings and live presentation will not be possible due to technical constraints. Hardware demonstrations may be possible but they are quite difficult in our experience due to low fps (frames per second).
      • In order to test your presentation setup, you can chose to be part of a test trial on some (not yet defined) evening before the event.
    • Regarding pre-recorded talks:
      • They need to be submitted as any video (recommended: 720p or 1080p, OGV file format) two weeks before the event (i.e. 26th of March 2021)
      • They will be played on time at the designated time slot
      • Videos must either be 20 or 40 minutes long as chosen as part of the Call-for-participation.
      • Video recording (and possibly video editing) must be managed by the speaker themselves. For Linux, we have positive experiences with recordMyDesktop and Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) for recording.
    • Regarding workshops:
      • Workshops will be limited to registered users (max: about 20). Registration ensures that not too many people join one session.
      • Audience will be invited to our BigBlueButton instance.
      • Workshops won’t be recorded, but users share a virtual room with the workshop leader.
    • Regarding pre-recorded lightning talks:
      • The same rules as in pre-recorded talks apply.
      • We have designated time slots for lightning talks. A lightning talk can last up to 5 minutes.
      • Unfortunately, we are not able to offer live lightning talks. They need to be pre-recorded.
  • Participants can join the chat to interact with the speaker as well as other participants.
  • What was part of GLT19, but won’t be available at GLT21? Information booths, child care, food trucks, posters for advertisments distributed in Graz.

Soft facts

  • We plan to build a user interface with a chat as well as the live stream. This hopefully helps to improve interaction between speakers and audience. The chat does not require an account to keep it as inclusive as possible.
  • BigBlueButton will be used for workshops. Depending on configurability and bandwidth, we might open it for other use cases.
  • We plan to stream to Youtube. But if C3VOC helps us again, we might only stream to media.ccc.de. Be aware that youtube has a quite high latency (up to 12 seconds) which affects speaker/audience interaction.
  • We plan to have several angels per room available collecting questions, looking for technical difficulties (and reporting them), banning trolls, etc. to achieve a smooth event for speakers and audience.

A note on privacy

In theory, everyone can be anonymous during this event. In practice, we want to be sure everything runs smoothly, try to help people in need, and also want to thank our speakers. Thus, we are going to collect more data than usual:

  1. We are asking speakers for their usernames they plan to use in chat to be able to contact them when needed
  2. We are asking speakers for some address. In May 2021, we plan to send a thank-you package via snail mail.
  3. We are asking angels for their phone numbers as phone is one important communication device.

This information will only be stored for up to one year in the scope of GLT21.

Call for participation

Obviously, an event is not possible without a supporting community. We are very happy to have an established basis of organizers making this event possible, but we are always looking for volunteers. How can you help?

  • You are interested in submitting a talk/workshop? Visit pretalx.linuxtage.at.

  • You are interested in sponsoring us? Contact us, we have adjusted our sponsoring concept to the current situation.

  • You are interested as a participant? We keep our community informed with our newsletter and on twitter.

  • You are interested in helping as an angel during the event? Contact us. We need angels to keep the event running. You will have (some of) the following tasks:

    • Setting up hardware equipment (i.e. giving a helping hand to the infrastructure team)
    • Observing the chat, forwarding technical issues to our infrastructure team and blocking spam
    • Helping speakers with their setup
    • Documenting the event, aggregate media files and collect statistical data

  • You are interested in helping us before/after the event? Contact us. We need angels to …

    • finish graphics work (mainly Inkscape)
    • order and receive packages via snail mail with merchandise
    • set up, configure and maintain BigBlueButton/Jitsi instances on VMs
    • update our homepage
    • organize schedule publication and communicate with speakers
    • organize publication of recordings
    • organize and distribute thank-you packages

For questions, contact us via email.

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