Libre Graphics Meeting 2011, in a nutshell

It's Tuesday morning, May 10th. I'm running late, and I'm worried about a brochure design. Not just any brochure, though: it's the brochure for the Libre Graphics Meeting, a gathering of more than 100 developers, designers, and artists who write and use free (as in freedom) design software. For the developers, it's a rare opportunity to meet people they usually collaborate with over the internet. For the designers and artists, it's a chance to share inspiration and make a case for the features they want in the software they use. For me, it's a deep dive into the libre (or free-as-in-freedom) design community. For all of us, it's a time to talk about how we use our tools, what we want to/can do/should do, and where we want to be as a community in the coming years. In other words, it's not your typical nerd convention.

Let's back up a bit. In January, I met Louis Desjardins and a few members of the local team organizing the Libre Graphics Meeting (LGM) this year. Our task was to plan the sixth annual LGM, hosted biannually in our beloved Montreal. The organizing meetings were inspiring, messy, and somewhat confusing as people's availability and priorities flexed in the months between January and May. I stuck it out till the end, but more as an observer: Louis, some dedicated souls in Montreal and in Europe, a handful of sponsors and our friends at l'Ecole Polytechnique deserve the real credit. More than anything, our meetings were an opportunity for me to see the people and projects that are the mainstays of this growing community. So why is this on Koumbit's blog, you ask? Well, we did host a lovely little 5@7 to welcome the LGM's early visitors from out of town—props to Jenny (my counterpart in the design department) for that. And me? My job was the event brochure.

I did it in Scribus, a Libre Graphics software that I hadn't even installed until the Thursday before the event. (I feel like an excuse is needed for this horrible lack of planning. That excuse is the end of the academic year and my master's thesis proposal.) So, as you might expect, I had no choice but to plow straight in with producing a 32-page full-color bilingual brochure. I was armed with nothing more than a fairly advanced knowledge of InDesign and a healthy dose of last-minute panic. This didn't get me too far with Scribus' interface, which took a little time to learn (it is more comparable to Quark's). Of course, I'd snubbed the many quality tutorials available online and decided to learn the software the way I usually do—by fiddling with it (and judicious use of Google).

Predictably, this led to some problems that I could—should—have been able to avoid. The brochure, thanks to my glaring typo and Louis' busy schedule, wasn't printed until after everybody went home. So I arrived at the Scribus developers' meeting (at the insistence of the project lead) armed with nothing more than two pages of notes. Handwritten notes, with lots of underlines, exclamation marks, and an “AHHHHRGHH!!” or two. I felt like an impostor about to be tarred and feathered. After all, this project was the collective baby of a group of developers who'd been volunteering their time for years. And I was going to waltz in and criticize their baby, after using it for three effing days. I expected to be torn apart.

Of course, that's not how a functional project works when it's run and used by volunteers. There were fifteen or twenty of us—some advanced users, like the Libre Graphics Magazine team, others contributors or interested observers—in a quiet room with about an hour and a half to profit from each others' experiences as much as possible. The developers showed off the new features and interface of Scribus 1.5, and talked about the miseries of its compatibility with Ubuntu. Peter, the project lead, waxed poetic on the finicky nature of the PDF as a document type destined for commercial printing presses. We discovered a few undocumented features in the software, and discussed an upcoming transition to XML with CSS formatting, which would make it easier for advanced users to manipulate the documents they produced (by using the same languages we use to build and style websites). The Libre Graphics Magazine group brought up some of the problems I'd had—vindication!—and at one point instigated a heated debate about the best way to link, update, and process files. Louis, several developers, and different members of the magazine team became emotionally involved in the intricacies of scripting the proposed feature in Python. I broke out in a cold sweat and fantasized about designing solely with pen, paper, and paste.

Then it was my turn: I tried not to sound snarky or mean when I said things like, “Guides, frames and page numbers should always be visible on the top layer of the document” and “What is the point of the story editor?” and “Tables, WTF?!” The room was almost supernaturally calm: they had a new user, fresh from the wild, and they were genuinely interested. They didn't just listen, but tried to tease out the nature of the problem so they could solve it. One of the developers offered a workaround for keeping the page numbers from disappearing beneath page graphics; another explained that they'd already fixed this in Scribus 1.5. The community coordinator sitting next to me patiently explained, “You use the story editor if you want to. Some people want to. If you don't, don't.” Of course—it's a software made to satisfy everybody. As for tables...they're coming soon. In the next release. They promised.

There were a lot of trivial things I brought up—things I figured only a new user would care about, or things too small to be on the developers' radar. Like, “Right menu should stay where I leave it!” and “When I select and replace text, I expect the new text to retain the formatting of the original selection.” The development team bore with these comments with remarkable patience and interest. And, better still, one of the Libre Graphics magazine group said later that she was thrilled that I'd brought up the little things. “We use it every day, and we forget about these problems. But they're there, and they should be fixed. It will make things easier for all of us.”

This spirit of open-minded optimism—that we can share our problems, debate their solutions, and make better tools and better work going forward—characterized the whole conference. This kind of "we can do it!" attitude is what I love about Koumbit and other open collaborative spaces, but it seemed especially fresh, curious and optimistic at the LGM. In the spirit of full disclosure, I missed a lot of the event due to other work commitments. I was lucky enough to catch Femke Snelting's presentation, “Future Tools: The Libre Graphics Research Unit.” In it, she asked, “What future practices can we imagine, and which tools can make them happen?” To me, this is the most important idea to take away from the conference. That we can imagine freely (in every sense!) and that we can work together to design our tools and our work accordingly.

An archive of media and information from previous LGMs, including this year's, is available online at www.libregraphicsmeeting.org. All of the talks were filmed, and should be available online shortly. A copy of the brochure that I lovingly beat my head into for three days is available in Koumbit's portfolio.