 Do you want to produce a presenter? I'm not sure if it works with MacBook. Haven't tried it yet. I'm not sure if it works. No, I don't think it works. OK. And now it's not OK. Can you please take off the sign then? I'll introduce you and then we can get started. OK. So welcome all. Thank you for saying the last lightning talk of the day. We have Andrea Frecomandi. OK. Talking to us. Please give him a big round of applause. And Flo is yours. OK. Hi, everybody. I'm Andrea Frecomandi. Let's talk about how to write a novel using an open source software, Introduction to Bibisco. The story of Bibisco started in 1997 when Bjork published her third album, Homogenic. The track number four was the beautiful Bachelorette. At that time I was 22 years old and I used to watch the video of the song on the new Borm MTV Italy. The video features Bjork as a Bachelorette, a young woman who finds a book buried in her garden that begins to write itself. She takes the book to a publishing house and the book becomes so popular that everyone in the city starts reading it. Ever since I was a child I loved reading but the video impressed me so much that an urgency to write came over me. In that period I spent so many nights in front of my text editor, this one writing one word after another following the idea of the story I had in my mind. But every time I read what I had written I felt a deep disappointment. I didn't understand why but it didn't work. So after several attempts I gave up and I dedicated myself to finishing my study of computer engineering to reading and to being a 20 year old guy. But many years later I happened to watch the video again on YouTube and that urgency to write came back over me. But I decided to study a different approach. So I started to study dramaturgy and everything became clearer and I learned some important lessons. Lesson number one, the idea of the novel is to write guided only by the sacred fire of inspiration is quite naive. Lesson number two, the most important, the conflict of each character is the driving force of every novel. But what is exactly a conflict? A conflict is a desire to be realized is a reaction to an external situation. It is an inner need. Conflict leads a character to action and to change the condition of things. So a novel is the story of a change in the condition of things and of the evolution of characters during this process. There is no novel without conflict. That's it. So it's all about characters and novels only work if their characters are believable. Charters that are completely good or completely evil are stereotypes and for this are not believable. Charters are believable when you can understand the complexity of their human nature, their qualities, their defects, their contradictions. So how can create believable characters? The only way is to know everything about them, behavior, physical aspects, sociology, psychology, all their life before the novel begins. With these lessons learned, I decided to get to know my characters through a long series of questions such as an interview. So I prepared a character sheet on a simple text document, like this. When I started to fill in the form, the characters gradually took shape became real. It was wonderful because they were telling me their stories and I just had to listen and write down what they said. When I completed filling the forms I was ready to write the first scene of my novel but soon I found myself lost in a mountain of text document files. I tried to organize everything in folders on my notebook but wasn't enough. What I really needed was a novel development environment, a unique program in which defined the architectural elements of the novel to know my characters, to write my scenes with a fully featured text editor. I looked for a software like this but I couldn't find it. So I decided to make it myself because I thought I'm a developer. I have the super power of creative things. I soon realized that the project was complex and ambitious but at the same time was extremely exciting because it was my project and I felt a deep sense of well-being and fulfillment in seeing my literary soul and my computer soul which I have always considered as opposed to merging in the construction of something new. I used to work at the project in the free time I had after my family and my professional activities and my mantra becomes one today for Bibisco. After two years of work I released Bibisco 1.0 in the April 2014. I licensed Bibisco under the GPL 2.0. The project was well received and the help of the early adopter were crucial. They helped me to find bugs. They suggested me a new feature. They translated Bibisco in their own languages. They supported the project with posts and articles. They supported me with beautiful messages that were received as a computer consultant. And this is the magic of the open source community where people from all over the world without knowing each other work together to build something beautiful for the benefit of all. OK, let's have a brief look at the application. Bibisco is divided into sections each one accessible from the main menu bar. In the project section we have useful tips of dramaturgy that can help writers, especially the beginners to find their workflow. In the architecture section you can define the architectural elements of the novel. There is the premise that probably contains the entire novel in one sentence, conflict and resolution. We have the phabola. The phabola is narration of the ants in their logical and chronological sequence. Then we have the settings the description of place time and social context where the story is developed. Then we have the narrative strands each one connected to the development of one specific conflict. Every card has its status flag to indicate the status of the work. By default it is red for to do but you can easily change it to yellow for not yet complete or green for complete. You can define your architectural elements using the Bisco text editor. It is a fully featured text editor with all the usual commands for bold, italic underline and for the other formatting needs. There are also a specific commands and shortcuts for the dialogue symbols. On the bottom right you have a running word and character count. On the left you can change the status flag. This is the character section. The character section is divided into main character and the secondary characters. A main character has a conflict a driving force of the plot while a secondary characters don't have a conflict but it is useful for the story development. Let's go inside a main character's detail. Here we can find all the cards that you need to know everything about your character. Every card has its status flag and we also have a card for the attachment of the images of your character. Each card has a series of questions that let you know your character through an interview. If you don't like an interview mode you can describe a particular aspect of your character using a free text mode. In the location section you can describe the location of your novel and you can attach images at every location. This is the character section. The character section contains the chapter of course of the novel. Every chapter has its card with its status flag and its count badge. You can use drag and drop to reorganize the chapter inside the novel. Let's go inside a chapter detail view. Here we can find a card to indicate the main purpose of the chapter and a card for the notes. Then you can create the chapter by creating the individual scenes. Every scene has its card with its status flag and word count badge. You can use drag and drop to reorganize the scene inside your chapter. BBSCO saves all the revision of your scene that you can always view or restore a previous version. When you write your scene you can always view the structural elements of the novel, characters, location and chapters we have already written in a box next to the text editor. It was extremely useful because it's one program, the novel development environment. You can also tag the scene with the name of characters, point of view, location, time and narrative strands. If you tag properly the scene you can use this section because the analysis section shows you where and how often characters, location, point of view, narrative strands show up in your story and in exactly what chapter all in a visual way. For example, here you can see the chapter distribution in the chapters of your novel. Here you can see the chapter length graph. Finally in the export section it is possible to export the novel in PDF, RTF or as archive. Some numbers, at the moment VBispo has more than 40,000 downloads and is translated in 8 languages. VBispo is one of the 7 cool little open source projects that stood out in 2016 in the e-book of opensource.com. Let's get one more technical. The actual version of VBispo is the 1.5. VBispo 1.x is a Java desktop application that is available on Linux, Mac, Windows. It's written with Eclipse RCP framework but the user interface is written in HTML5 and JavaScript. For this reason the next release of VBispo 2.0 will be a fully HTML5 and JavaScript application and I'll use Electron framework by GitHub to write the next release. Here there are some references to get in touch with the project. We have a website, we have a blog, we have a mail of the project. Personal mail, we have a Facebook page, we have a Twitter page and of course we have our GitHub repository. About me, I'm Andara Fecomandi, I'm 41 years old, I'm from Bologna in the north of Italy and I'm a family man and I love my beautiful wife, I'm my two kids, I'm a passionate software engineer and I'm a city owner software also in Bologna, I love books, music, movies, TV series, basketball and Lego. I have not yet written my novel, but if it's true that a person is happy when he's able to fully develop his potential I can say with certainty that VBispo made me an happy person. That's it, thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Andrea, I think we have some time for questions. Can you wait one second and I'll bring the microphone over to you. How can you use all your cards like you described them in your BDF or something as a graph and use something like BDD programming and order generate like words or using some adjectives or some I don't know, some stuff about the characters and order generate like chapters or relationships between the characters and so on. Are you asking me about the relation of the characters? I know it's possible but have you ever thought of it and with your contributors like but at the moment you can write it in the cheat or in the cards of the characters but I'm thinking about to set a mind map to map the character relations in the next release of VBispo. Hi, do you know of any success stories in using your software? Like with actual books published. We have just at the start of this year we have started a blog to collect some success stories and we are waiting for the success stories of our users to publish and spread in the world. So, any other questions? See her hand raised over there. Hi. I tried to run VBisco on Linux distribution with OpenGDK and it didn't work because it seems that the VBisco Linux version ships with the Oracle Java implementation. Is it considered a bug because you mention Open Source a lot. I have to if you open an issue on a guitar bike and work on it maybe. In the next version of VBisco it's all full JavaScript in HTML5 and so there is no JRR problems. I think we have time for one last question if there are any takers. Get found? At the moment no. We are thinking about it but What format do you use for saving the data in VBisco? At the moment you are using a local database H2 is a local database in Java but in the next release 2.0 I think about using a simple JSON file to store everything. Will there be a hosted version? A hosted version in 2.0? I don't understand the question. I'm sorry. Will you post a version that everybody can access if it's online instead of downloading? I think about it but it's difficult for me at the moment to have an hosting that do that. So I prefer the people download on their machine. Confidentiality because maybe some people don't want to do it. Yes, it's also this aspect. So I'm sorry that's all the time we have. Andrea, thank you very much. Thank you.