38C3 Impressions

Last week I attended the 38th Chaos Communication Congress (38C3) in Hamburg, Germany as part of the KDE presence there.

KDE Assembly

After 37C3 this was the second time we had a KDE assembly there, this time as part of the Bits & Bäume Habitat. Besides putting us near to some of our friends and partners this made us much easier to see and find.

The new location meant we no longer had soldering irons and 3D printers at arms length, but instead a chemistry lab across the aisle, but also more immediately useful things like a workshop area and some couches and tables for smaller meetings and discussions.

More people than last time came by, and had overwhelmingly positive feedback about KDE’s work.

Open Transport Community

Most of my time at 38C3 I spent (unsurprisingly) around public transport topics:

• Jonah presented Transitous, our free and open community-run public transport routing service. Great talk, fully packed room with people standing in multiple rows in the back, and lots of discussion afterwards.
• With Transitous existing now some formerly rather theoretical topics became much more relevant, such as synthesizing GTFS-RT realtime information feeds in places where we lack official sources. This could potentially be done using data collected for statistical analysis like bahnvorhersage.de or GPS vehicle position (e.g. as found in position-only GTFS-RT feeds or obtained via crowd sourcing).
• There’s ideas for a dedicated multi-day Europe-wide Open Transport conference floating around.

Somewhat related is the aspect of decoding ticket barcodes and extracting travel information from booking documents in any shape or form, something KDE Itinerary makes heavy use of.

• The talk What’s inside my train ticket? provided a nice overview of some of the things we also have implemented and highlights many of the absurdities encountered along the way. Lots of overlap and thus room for collaboration here, the author is already in the Itinerary Matrix channel and just the exchange so far already allowed for some progress towards decoding Trenitalia FCB ticket barcodes.
• Discussed with the K-9/Thunderbird Android team how we could potentially solve the problem that you currently can’t share the full unmodified email from a mail app to apps like Itinerary. There are ideas, we have yet to see whether they hold up against Android’s limitations though.

And as usual, just chatting with the many attendees working on related projects and/or at public transport operators always provides some new and interesting insights.

Emergency and Weather Alerts

Another topic I was involved with was emergency and weather alerts. Nucleus and I presented the work on FOSS infrastructure for receiving emergency alerts towards the end of the final day.

Despite the slightly unfortunate time slot we got several contacts afterwards to people working at or with German alerting authorities, or having contacts that do. Any better understanding on how those organizations work and who to talk to for getting the issues we presented addressed should help. Let’s see where this leads us.

Other things discussed:

• The applicability of CAP to maritime use/maritime hazards. Existing options are apparently not particularly accessible for hobbyists, cell broadcast has a limited reach out onto the sea while satellite-based Internet has become fairly wide-spread on ships.
• The use-case of ship or aircraft crews who regularly visit many different countries, national solutions don’t scale sufficiently for that. So our work could also be interesting outside of the Google-free target audience we initially started with.
• Setting up synthetic CAP feeds for infrastructure and software testing.
• Adding an interface for alerting authorities to check whether their alerts were received and processed correctly, as suggested by someone working at such an agency.
• The OSM team pointed me to some useful tools for boundary geometry extraction I wasn’t aware of yet (something that’s needed here for resolving geographic codes of affected area to actual geometry).

And just as I got back home an alert related to a burst 700mm water main line nicely demonstrated all the issues with German alerts we had highlighted in our talk again.

Accessibility

While the above topics consumed most of my time, I also managed to attend two sessions related to accessibility.

In the context of KDE we usually think of accessibility of our software there, or more specifically the AT-SPI interface for screen readers. That’s of course an important part, but it’s just one aspect to consider. The usability of a video conferencing software for people who cannot hear was shown as one such example.

There’s even more beyond our software that is even less in focus usually, such as the accessibility of the contribution process and or our events.

Another aspect is “real world” things whose accessibility can be impacted by our software. One example for this is allowing to customize a routing profile to your needs. With the MOTIS v2 update on Transitous things will improve there, but we are not exposing much of this in our client apps yet.

For emergency alerts this is similar, a cell broadcast warning makes so much noise that it’s hard to miss, as long as you can actually hear. If you can’t, e.g. making your connected room lights flash might be more effective to get your attention.

The nice thing of having free infrastructure to build upon is that such solutions become much easier to implement.

Distributions & Partners

We also had a few people approach us with distribution-related topics at the KDE assembly.

Examples:

• Discussing update strategies, packaging and QA with Tuxedo.
• Discussing integration issues with Plasma and QA approaches with Qubes OS.
• Investigating startup performance issues on NixOS (caused by their XDG search paths containing hundreds of entries it seems).

While we could probably help in most cases, we were lacking someone deeply involved in Plasma development here.

Funding

Sustainable funding of FOSS work also came up at a few occasions:

• We attended a short meeting with the Sovereign Tech Agency, who offer public funding for longer-term foundational/maintenance work rather than shorter prototype projects (GNOME and OSM e.g. got significant funding from them). Quite interesting for KDE, but currently out of money due to the collapse of the German government.
• We discussed donation strategies with a couple of other FOSS projects, ie. when and how to best ask our users for help.
• Members of the K-9/Thunderbird mobile team showed and interesting approach of using in-app purchases as a donation mechanism. That’s only viable on the proprietary Google and Apple platforms and comes with a heavy fee, but it does provide a very low threshold to donate for users on those platforms.

And more…

And all that’s just my perspective, I don’t even have the full overview of everything that happened around KDE, such as the workshops following Joseph’s talk on fighting the environmental impact of software or Robert Riemann’s work on lobbying the European public administration to use FOSS. More reports will hopefully appear on Planet KDE.

There’s unfortunately no way to catch up on the hallway track and self-organized sessions, but recordings of most of the presentations are available on media.ccc.de (many also with translations into other languages).

Conclusion

Overall these were four days with a refreshing redefiniton of “normality” again, so that neither stumbling over a self-driving couch table nor a 24/7 live DJ dance club in one of the rest rooms stuck out as particularly unusual. You could spend a lot of time on discovering and exploring the various projects, (art) installations, easter eggs and rabbit holes on display there, all while there’s criminal cases and national scandals you probably know from the evening news being discussed on the main stage, by the people who uncovered those.

And that is just the backdrop for a giant networking and collaboration meeting with people working on FOSS/Open Data/Open Hardware projects in any size or form, public administration and infrastructure, science and research, education/universities, funding organizations, politics and lobbying, civil/social initiatives, etc.

More of this please :)