i am at the libre graphics meeting in brussels; this is the 5th annual gathering of people who use and develop open source tools for graphics. like the software, the event is free, & pretty well organised - the programme is packed but femke's excellent time-keeping skills are keeping the presentations moving along.

the presentations have ranged from the deeply geeky to the metaphysical, from hardware to software to textile art & design. there are even a few other performance artists here, which is nice. on thursday i presented UpStage & gave a short workshop, altho unfortunately network problems prevented us from doing as much as we hoped. all of the presentations are being videoed & are available online almost immediately - you can see mine here (with more network problems, as suzon was supposed to appear in UpStage from indonesia, but her mobile internet connection was flaky ... such are the challenges of cyberformance!).

as many of the presentations have been 15 minute lightning talks, my brain is starting to blur everything together. but a few highlights still stand out. yesterday tom lechner presented laidout, a desktop publishing programme he developed for publishing comic books. as well as laying out flat books, content can be laid out onto arbitrary polyhedral surfaces, & his dramatic finale was a demo of creating & then "unwrapping" one such polyhedral surface (as shown).

hong phuc dang talked about how to get developers from vietnam & asia involved in open source projects; steve conklin demonstrated the beginnings of multi-touch support in ubuntu; lukás tvrdý showed some beautiful brush engines; & lots more. there have been quite a lot of presentations about print publishing using only open source software, including today a talk by marcus holland-moritz about how he made a coffee table book of photos from his trip to new zealand using only free software.

there are quite a few eclectic tech carnival women here, some of whom i'd only known online before, & aileen will be blogging about it all in due course. there have been yummy lunches & last night a delicious dinner, & generally a convivial atmosphere. right now i'm in the coffee room, where there are several groups huddled around laptops talking excitedly. it's a great environment for developers and end-users of open source software to be able to come together & collaborate & network. very inspiring!