New Hampshire Liberty Forum & Trisquel / Free Software

I just wanted to let people know we're going to have a ThinkPenguin table at the New Hampshire Liberty Forum in Manchester, New Hampshire, USA this coming week. Feb 18th - 21st, 2016, but most stuff is on the 19th and 20th. As always we'll be showing off Trisquel on laptops and pushing free software. You can read more here: https://www.thinkpenguin.com/blog and http://nhlibertyforum.com/schedule/

There are a number of reasons I'd suggest going to this event. It's a really great event first off. Like LibrePlanet New Hampshire Liberty Forum always has some really great talks and people in attendance that mash up well with free software activism. Humorously the keynote this year is the same as it is for LibrePlanet: Edward Snowden (he has been getting around to these sorts of events, he talked at the last HOPE; ie hackers conference NYC for example). Then there are some great technical talks and other free software advocate participants in the movement (you may need to open your eyes and recognize some names/faces/subject matter of the talks/projects/etc as it's not specifically about free software- but often connected in some way).

Just to give people an idea of the talks/participants:

- MaidSafe - A project to decentralize the Internet will be there (I believe this is mainly about storage decentralization/cloud decentralizing so the users are in cahoots with each other to store each others data in a secure, reliable, distributed, and optimised way, rather than say on Amazon Cloud or Google Drive)

- Louis Calitz will be holding a "New Hampshire Freedom Engineers Meetup" (poor choice of wording in the description of him, but none-the-less, http://nhlibertyforum.com/speakers/louis-calitz/)

- BitCoins BitCoins BitCoins everywhere- if you own a business and are involved in the libertarian movement in New Hampshire you accept BitCoins- lots of vendors will be accepting so bring them if you got them!

- A panel discussing the Library Freedom Project which is a project that involved bringing Tor to libraries - the Department of Homeland Security tried to get it shut down! But thanks to liberty activists the library chose to ignore the threats.

- Arcade City: Decentralized, Blockchain-Based Answer to Uber

- Edward Snowden Keynote (Unknown Topic)

- Ross Ulbricht’s Appeal: Why it’s important to us all (Silk Road, BitCoins, Tor, etc)

- The Future of Internet Privacy

- Start Mail - Privacy Friendly Email Provider (well, last year, looks like they might not be there this year)

There was a great talk by one of the participants at PorcFest two years ago titled (PorcFest is another summer event held by the same group and attracts similar people; ie Free State Project):

Free Software is for Freedom Lovers - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fu2Uvybgbk

Adam Leibson, an ex-employee of ThinkPenguin, and intern of the FSF last summer did a talk on Email Self-Defense:

https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/teaching-email-self-defense-campaigns-intern-leads-a-workshop-at-porcfest

Just to give people an idea of some of the faces you might encounter should you participate....

There are quite a few others... but these are some that come to mind.