 And I'm here to speak today about building a freedom-based photography community. And just briefly, the reason that I approached this problem originally, what motivated me to say we needed something that would allow us to bring together all of us that like to do photography in some ways, a hobby or professionally or otherwise, and using free software, right? The number one reason for me, once upon a time, a long, long time ago, was mostly due to the quality of the existing tutorials for doing photography at the time. They were bad. Very, very bad. And it was frustrating because there were bad tutorials for proprietary software as well. But for some reason, we seemed to see a disproportionately large number of poor tutorials for free software. And I don't know if that's because the barrier to entry is so much lower for people to try it and to try to monetize it, which was another thing that annoys me to no end. It was really just a, here's a simple thing that I learned, how to do an unsharp mask to add pop to an image. It needs a five-page article, all on individual pages, so you have to click through every one of them. And I'm going to put as many ads as I can physically fit on a web page for every four lines of text that I give you, plus an image. And this is rampant. It was rampant, and it's still rampant now, unfortunately, right? So this was really a primary thing. I was a photographer, as an amateur. I really enjoyed doing it as a hobby. I wanted to figure out how to do some neat things. And all I ever found was, do this same thing. And I found that in 18 different websites over and over and over again, the same thing, right? The other thing was, Alex once said to me, and I'm assuming people know who Alex Procadine is, Libre Graphics World, right? So he had posted an article on doing compositing in proprietary software and talking about doing it in free software, and I had made the unfortunate comment, because I didn't know who he was, saying, well, that's really easy to do on GIMP. You don't have to worry about it. It's very simple. And his answer was very important to me, because it was really one of those impetus things that kicked everything off that happened from there. And it was, so show me. This actually seems to be the moniker for an awful lot of free software projects. We talk about it, and talking is okay, but doing is always greater than talking. And that was the point that I think that I took away from that comment from him at that time. Yeah, all right. You think it's easy to do? Well, show me how it's easy to do. And then I had to go away, and a few months later, I came back with something a little bit better, I hope. So the problem was, we did have a few places where there were some helpful photographic things in the free software community. One of those was Ralph Steinholtzmeetthegimp.org. Does anybody know this site? Yeah? A few people maybe, right? He was one of the few people who was speaking that language, right? Photography is a hobby, doing high quality results, or as high quality as he could with the tools that he had, using free software primarily. And it was a lot of fun to watch his videos and look through that. We also had a couple of forums, places like gimpchat.com, for example, that I would frequent. The problems that I had with gimpchat, though, was that the primary focus here was more on artistic digital arts in some way, not necessarily photography focused, right? Or forum signatures and avatars, mostly. Most of the users have a script that actually produces it. And they're all great people and they're super friendly, but they just weren't photographers, right? That's really what I was interested in. And then there was another guy that produced a site that had at least a couple of tutorials that I think were maybe a little useful in some way, because it at least began shaping the idea of focusing on photography, specifically, and what tools were available to do what things, right? Those of you that don't know, this is actually my blog. This is the first try that I had after speaking with Alex, and so show me. This was, okay, well, fine, I'm going to show him. This guy doesn't know who I am or what I'm talking about, because I didn't know who he was at the time, either, so it made it extra funny when I figured it out later. Awkward conversations with him later on. So, spiritually, I follow that path. So, you know, I started this. I started this idea, but the problem that I had with this was that I also monetized this blog, and I realized that I didn't, you know, it was a personal blog and that's really where it should have sat. I want to monetize that, that's my own thing. I wanted to do something that wasn't about that or specifically about me, but rather about the people that I knew that had taught me some really neat things and an opportunity to pay it forward to them as well. So the problem is looking at the state of photography tutorials that are maintaining a high level of quality for most, and in almost every case, you'll end up finding them existing almost entirely in a proprietary realm. Places like Flern, Kelby One, Linda, F-stoppers, forums like DP Review, Cambridge and Color, Luminous Landscapes and these guys, right? There's a lot of smart people out there, but they're all very locked in to using a proprietary software workflow. If they talk about free software at all, it is purely either in passing or to tell me that GIMP can't handle high bit debts. Over and over and over again. So I said, well, what can we do? What can I do, at least? So show me, right? So I said, let me get a mission statement. I felt this was very important. I needed a statement that described what I was driving at because that was going to be the thing that would direct me for the rest of the time I was working. And it happened to be, I wanted a site that would provide tutorials, workflows, and a showcase. We're doing high quality photography using free software. That's the entire crux of what I am trying to do still with pixels.us, which is actually how I pronounce that. If anybody was curious, pixels.us. So I looked at it and I said, all right, well, I need two things primarily. They were important to me. One, I needed to have a website to host this content, and I wanted to have a community. The content portion of it, for me, was entirely to be built in static HTML because I didn't need a dynamic website on the back end for this kind of stuff. I mean, Derek's, if anybody knows Derek's from Open Seuss, is the one who really kind of pushed me down the path of looking at building out a static website, rather than a dynamic one like WordPress or Drupal or Joomla or one of these frameworks. I just went with Node.js and Metalsmith and JINJA templates on the back side to build a static site out with. And that's, if you haven't been to the site, this is what the current homepage kind of looks like at this point, right? What's nice is I can host this content even at high traffic times because of it being static on a relatively small server infrastructure. I don't need a whole lot of overhead to serve the site. The other side was the community, and this is honestly the most important part to me, because I had a static website. I wanted people to be able to interact with each other. These are comments, but the problem is comments on the internet suck right now very badly, right? Unless you're hosting your own infrastructure and doing that, I don't want to give a whale of your information as users to something like disgust because you might not. I don't blame you if you wouldn't. I don't want to be tracked by them. Anybody know? Not many. There's a couple, self-hosted solutions, but again, I had a static site, right? I didn't want to have a dynamic site running in the background for comments. So what I did was I set up another site, a forum using Discourse. This was by Jeff Atwood and Sam Saffron. I don't know if you guys know these people. Coding Horror, right? This is their pet project for the last few years. And Discourse is a rethinking of how forum software should run. What's nice is one of the side effects of using that software was I can embed forum topics as comments on a post and you can see that on your own if you have a look at the site later on. But this is what the forum ends up looking like, right? And we have, I feel, we've been reasonably successful so far. I kicked this idea around in Leipzig in 2014 with everybody and said mostly with Rolf and we'd like to get into this. And I finally got her on a writing something in August of 2014. The forum came about eight months later in April of 2015. Since April of 2015, one year ago, we've grown to just under 500 users now. And you guys would have seen this slide in the State of the Libre Graphics presentation as well. Gamik came on board using Pixels as its official forum. Rolf Therapy came on board here as its official forum so their flood of users as they closed down their official forums as it was on PHPBB. And then PhotoFlow, which you saw earlier and Filmulator from Carlo Vacchari came on board as well. We've got articles, we've got blogs, we have tutorials, we have content written from people in the community, not just me. I have a few that are mine, of course, but Ian Hex and Elle Stone of both bank contributors, Tobias from The Dark Table Project, Andrea Ferrero, who was the author of PhotoFlow, you would have seen earlier, has written some tutorials and videos, Carlo Vacchari and of course myself. So the thing that was important to me about the community of having this all together was prior to this you had to go to individual forums if you wanted to think. Dark Table, no problem, I'm going to go to your mailing list. Rolf Therapy, they had a separate forum somewhere else. Gamik, separate forum somewhere else. Gimp, several forums in different places depending on what you want to do. The problem was they weren't all connected in any way. A user in Rolf Therapy wasn't being exposed to ideas from the Dark Table Prouder, and he even knew that there was an opportunity to do something like that. Same thing with a Gimp user, right? I open my files, I get UF RAW, it's nothing against UF RAW, but it's not really a modern raw processing engine. You might not even know that it exists without having some kind of exposure to those kinds of things. But we have an opportunity now in this forum that everybody gets to kind of cross-pollinate across the same idea. Rather than say this forum is for this software, it's now this community is for this thing. This is photography. That's the topic. I don't do art, I don't do forum signatures and avatars, I don't do digital painting. We just talk about photography and all the details that go into that. And we have a lot of fantastic users doing kinds of cool projects. I'm sorry, Carlo, if I butcher your name again. With the filmulator project, an algorithm that he put together for simulating the development of film in the real world, right? And it's a neat project that he has going on his own, just by people on the forum to consider making it a dark table module. After a little bit of back and forth to the dark table developers, it happened very quickly. That's a neat opportunity that might not have happened otherwise. We've got Damon from the Rapid Photo Downloader Project on here as well. And these people are all talking. He solicited a ton of great feedback from the users not long ago, and he had a giant thread full of people giving him feedback on how they felt his software should work. So we've been very successful, I think so far. And I hope we were able to continue to do so with very talented people sharing a lot of great information. So in the future, what do we have? Need. Where do we need to go? More content. I don't have enough now. These sites live and die based on the kind of content and the frequency by which it gets posted, but the problem is they have to make a trade-off between post-frequency and quality. And I prefer to err on the side of quality, and luckily everybody in the community has been very patient with new content. Because we have a lot of things happening on the forum otherwise. So that is actually the major thrust going forward. More tutorials, more articles, more interviews, more things of that nature. And that's hopefully time-ish, roughly. And that's roughly time. That's my little girl. I said make a funny face, and this is the funny face she gave me. So that is... Please visit us.