hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr1018.txt

Episode: 1018
Title: HPR1018: Interview with Christel Dahlskjaer of the FreeNode project.
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1018/hpr1018.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-17 17:28:29

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Hello everybody, my name is Ken Thalano, and we're here outside, our camp is over actually,
and we're outside with Crystal in the beer garden, I guess, outside the restaurant.
How are you doing, Crystal?
I'm doing very, very well.
I'm talking to you today, and I think a lot of people might be familiar with your voice,
and I just realized to you how are you doing?
I'm doing well, yeah, definitely, it's been a great weekend, it's been great to come
and meet so many people from the community, and I think the old radio guys, old radio,
old camp guys, have done a fantastic job.
I have to agree with you there.
Now some people might know you from another podcast, can you tell us what that is?
Yes, we had a very brief but fairly successful period of doing a free and old live podcast,
which I guess came about a bit after the radio, sadly,
fell down the drain, because Jono got married and moved away, and all that rubbish stuff,
and none of them had time.
So a few people contacted us and said, hey, can't we do something?
We'll do something cool.
So we tried doing our own podcast for a while, so we had a few episodes, it was incredibly fun,
and it was pretty well received from the community.
It went down very well, I just recognized your voice there, and what was that to show all about?
Well, I guess the primary thing for us was that it was about Renoed,
or perhaps not much about Reno, because Renoed isn't about Renoed.
Renoed is about the 75,000 users we have every day.
It's about the thousands and thousands of open source projects.
We've got the various groups.
You know, we have users from, you know, we've got Ubuntu, we've got Wikipedia,
we've got Apache, MySQL, Gen2, Excerver Linux.
The list goes on and on and on and on, and there's just so much to take from,
so much to take inspiration from, and so much new stuff happening all the time,
I guess we're sort of privy to, because we're there, and there's so much chatter,
and everyone is talking about it, and everyone gets hyped up.
So it was very easy for us in that period to, to, I guess, grab onto what's happening in our community,
and trying new things, we did some better testing of various stuff,
which we spoke about it.
We spoke about what was rubbish, we spoke about the fights that had happened.
And just to clarify, what actually is Renoed when you say,
Renoed is a project that is provided by the Peer Directed Project Centre,
which is a not-for-profit organisation, which was, I guess, to start with,
created for Renoed.
Free Noed is a IRC network, although I guess we're a bit unconventional in that sense, too.
We exist to provide a sort of chat infrastructure for
Free Noed open source software projects and Peer Directed projects.
And we've been around for nearly 14 years, and we've currently got 75,000 daily users.
Of which quite a lot of our community are apart in the hash,
hash, augcast, planet, so it's trying to get us a brain in here.
Yes, absolutely. There's many, many podcasters and augcasters, if you wish.
Who use Free Noed, both to have somewhere to interact with their listeners,
and also to take questions and feedback during their shows,
or during their recordings, or during their live shows.
And, yeah, it's quite cool.
Okay, and how did Free Noed start?
Free Noed originally sprung from a channel on a different IRC network created by
a man who was called Rob Levin. Rob decided to move the channel and create his own network
back in 1998. He created Free Noed, or as it was then called, I should notice,
open projects.
That was around until 2001 when he sort of changed, and it became Free Noed by 2002.
The network has steadily grown. Unfortunately, Rob passed away back in 2006.
He was a victim of a hit and run accident in Texas where he lived,
which was a bit of a massive change for everyone, because he'd sort of been
the cornerstone. Yeah, because it was his side, it was his baby, and it's been,
it was a very scary time. I guess the first, probably the first couple of years after he passed
away to sort of see whether we could bring his baby up as it were, but we have more than doubled
in size since he passed, and we've got much more projects on board, and I guess we've expanded a
bit. In the States, we now arrange conferences called FOSCON, Free and Open Source Software Conference.
Yeah, that's us. We've done two of them in the States so far, and we're in
started planning for actually doing one in the UK, so we want to do sort of Europe and US.
So that's hopefully going to be exciting. For us, again, it was all about the community,
and trying to do something that isn't as commercialised as a lot of conferences have become.
So we do that, then we also have a few other projects. We have FOS events, which Laura Tchaikovsky,
who also was involved with on camp, is quite involved with, who basically, I don't know,
I guess basically they stalk people to find out what's going on, from lug meetings to bigger
conferences to cool talks at various, yeah, both sort of FOSI ones and things that could be of
interest to the FOS community, but which may actually be sponsored by someone completely different.
Yes. So that's been quite good. We've got a lot of people following that, both people who use
free note and people who don't, and that's quite nice to actually be able to, I don't know, do
something for a wider community again. And then a couple of years ago, we started doing Geeknix,
which was sort of our clever name. We had a Geeknix yesterday as part of our camp,
and it was one of those names we came up with, and we registered a website and started
planning a few just across the UK to start with. And then before we knew it, people were doing
it all over the globe, and that was really, really cool too. So yeah, we're basically, I don't know,
I guess our main focus is sort of bringing the community together. We're not necessarily, well,
the people who volunteer for free note and the PDPC are generally technical people,
because we pick our volunteers from the various projects that use us. We'll generally
stalk someone for a while and decide, hey, you're quite clever, we like you. And it works,
we've gotten some great people that way. But our sort of main focus, I guess, is
making it easier for people to get together and communicate, and maybe I guess we're trying to
take some of the pressure off the people who run the projects, because often a project
a very, very technical project may be run by someone who's very, very technically minded,
but who doesn't really have the inclination or the interest to go and do that whole,
let's be matey and chatty, and that side of things. So I guess we sort of try to just bring
people together. That's a lot of sort of things, I guess. Yeah, yeah, very much so that's okay.
Where are the servers physically located for this? All across the globe. We have some servers that
are our own, or I say our own, they're probably the communities, because they're the ones donating
to actually keeping them running. Then we also have a host of servers that are sponsored by various
companies who support open source in one way or another. Bytemark, for example, who also
sponsored on camp. Variety of universities, sponsor servers for free now, because they tend to be
quite keen on what we do, and they usually have fairly good bandwidth, and some decent hardware
we can use. Of course, they've been sort of a laboratory in Oregon, and it's obviously sponsoring
a suite a lot. I think we've got about six servers at their latest entry. It seems to me a bit
strange, or probably not in the Twitter world, that text on the command line is the way that the
open source community seems to communicate. Yes, yes, it probably is, because let's face it,
I see has been around for a very long time now. It became a bit mainstream, I guess about 20
years ago, and it's still very much prevailing. It's a very big thing, and we're growing rapidly,
so people are clearly liking that way of communicating. They're not to say that we haven't
thought of other ways, because every time there's a new platform out there, we think, oh shit,
is this the time where we need to refocus? Do we need to look at what do we need to show? I mean,
we spent years, umming and eyeing, thinking, do we need to go over to the Jabber platform?
Is that going to be the next big thing? So far, so good. I think I see it's around to stay,
at least for now. But there's certainly a lot of other things out there, which are also very
useful to people, like Identica and Twitter. Yeah, I think your organisation from the point
of view of the geek mix and everything else, it seems to have, it's more about the community,
rather than the technology. Yes, absolutely. I think we're, I think that's one thing we've always
sort of argued a bit, because a lot of people will come and say, you're not doing IRC,
the way things IRC should be done, because I've been on FNET, or I've been on Undernet,
or DALNET, or IRC, and they don't do it like this. And then it's trying to explain to them,
well, actually, we don't really care about that. As long as we can sort of bring the people together
and give them some more they can talk, and some more we can all collaborate, and, you know,
share ideas and thoughts and learn from each other, then, you know, it doesn't really matter
how we do it or what we do it on. And I think for many sort of, I guess, conventional IRC users,
that's a difficult one to bite off. So yeah. Can you tell us a little bit about the organisation
behind us? Yes. FreeNode is run by just short of 40 volunteers currently, who come from across
the globe. Every single of our volunteers will be involved with another project on FreeNode in
one sense or another. One of the things we've always found very important is to make sure that
we don't have a lot of people who sort of manage and bust people around. So we try to make sure
that our volunteers are first and foremost users. That's how I came aboard a long, long time ago.
I'd been a user of FreeNode. I came there via my old lug when I lived in San Diego,
and I'd been there for, I don't know, about three years or so when Lyleau or Rob Levin, if you wish,
asked what I've been, because I'd been interested in trying out this as a volunteer staffer on
FreeNode. And I thought, no, no, I'll never be able to do that in a while. And here I am, 11 years
later running the network. Yes, sitting outside in a beer garden. Yeah. So it's funny. Yeah.
I mean, on paper, I guess the FreeNode is owned by the PDPC and the PDPC consists of myself and
five other people. Yes, the peer-directed project center, that's an offer for profit organization
that runs FreeNode and Geeknik and Foscon. But the PDPC or such doesn't really have anything to do
with the day-to-day running of the network, where I mean, our interest in FreeNode is to, I guess,
secure the funds to be able to pay for the service we pay for, make sure that there's someone
there with the knowledge and capacity to deal with anything that should cope up, be it legal or
financial or, yeah, say it's, it's, by all means, it's a legal entity that's just that sort of safeguard
there. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know if our listeners are aware, but there's a way you can donate.
Yes, yes, there is. You can, if you do wish to donate to FreeNode, you can go to the FreeNode.net
website and you can choose to donate. We have monthly subscription, we have yearly subscriptions
and we have one of donations. And of course, if you're a company and you wish to make a larger
donation, then you can always get in touch with us and we'll help you out. Yes, I've been a subscriber
for a few years now. Yeah, excellent, thank you. Excellent. Thank you very much for taking the time
to have the interview. Is there anything else I missed? No, not really. Although I should probably
stress the fact that we are arranging a Foscon in Europe and we've had great success in the states,
if you're a European listener, whether you're in the UK or somewhere else,
then keep an eye out for foscon.org.uk and come to our conference because that's going to be
really, really, really awesome. You heard it here, folks. Yet another conference that I have to
convince my wife to let me go too. Thank you very, very much for taking the time to do the interview
and tune in tomorrow for another exciting episode on Hacker Public Radio.
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