 Hi, I'm I'm Pat David We had a Libre graphics track for the very first time on Friday here at scale We had a lot of folks talking about free software and the software and communities that we have around creative Creative endeavors, I'm gonna talk today about building something that we called pixels dot us Which is a photography community that's based entirely on Using free software, but also extending those ideals to the material that people might want to have when they want to learn how to do things with photography and Why did we look at this and the reason that we did was that we looked out at the creatives that like to do things In particular with photography and video and other things and that there was no central place for this right if I wanted to Talk about photography or something. I didn't have a central place to go to commune with other people that were based around The concept of doing that thing doing photography from my own part I did it because of bad gimp tutorials originally and when I wanted to learn how to process some of my photographs to make Them look great and find a free software option to do it you end up at gimp for the most part I hope I'm a member of the gimp team if you want to fight you can meet me outside the door The and the problem was all these tutorials had they were poor quality. They were cheaply monetized, right? I have to click through 10 different pages to look at 18 different steps So that I could see 20 different ads to learn how to add a blur to an image or make it pop a little bit And it was obnoxious which was pain extra painful because there are proprietary options and Learning platforms that were doing this far better than anyone in the free software community And it's painful because we have dark table raw therapy gimp fantastic Projects that I think are at least on par or better than some proprietary options But that's not the same thing with the community and learning resources that were available. So what do we do? What was the answer to that problem? I have great software, but not so great community or learning resources. Well and True open source spirit. I just said I'm gonna go do it I had no idea if it was gonna work But I said I'm gonna make a community that specifically had the goal which was to provide tutorials Showcases and workflows for doing high quality photography Using nothing but free software and even better extending that ideal to the material we produced if I write a tutorial It's CC licensed Remix it as you want to all the images in it or also CC license all these images by the way are from our community members at Pixels.us done entirely with free software in every instance I happen to be lucky enough to be friends with a lot of guys from cool projects And anyone ever heard dark table raw therapy gimp. I'm a member of the gimp team again gimmick did you cam? These are all fantastic projects, but guess what they were siloed Right if I wanted to learn how to do something in dark table. I will go to the dark table mailing list which is great Unless somebody from the raw therapy mailing list might know something that would help me with the problem I happen to have and that person was never gonna see my question because they weren't on the dark table mailing list necessarily right We fractured this and the problem was I said look let's get everyone together in the community around the idea of Photography with free software not a piece of software. I'm not talking come to the gimp community Right. I'm not talking go to the dark table community I'm saying come to where we have other photographers talking about photography We all happen to use free software and so it did we started to kind of coalesce It's been a just over three years now since I sat at my dining room table and said maybe I should make a website I think I would like to meet some other people that do photography and we have we've had a ton of articles and blogs on the site Now a ton of great tutorials with a lot of community engagement where people were writing things for others and sharing it all freely With everyone in the community to use remix learn and extend. That's the most important one, right? From an open-source standpoint and free software standpoint one of extended and we've had great growth This is the bottom down there is kind of a just my generic traffic growth patterns. It's not exponential because It's free software photography the small Venn diagram where it collides, but it's you'll notice though. It's it's steady Right. It may not be exponential growth But it's a slow bit of steady growth as we begin to publicize and proselytize about coming out to do Photography and learn about it. So if you like photography, I guarantee everyone in here likes to take pictures I very much doubt anyone's gonna say they don't enjoy taking photos Well, you have a place now as a photographer to come and check it out using nothing but free software and free software Workflows and where everything is being shared openly for everybody. Thank you very much again. I'm Pat David You