GLOBAL - August 22, 2009 - Cutting edge graphics software meets free culture at Libre Graphics Meeting 2010 in Brussels

Users and developers of Free, Libre and Open Source graphics software will meet in Brussels, Belgium on May 26-29, 2010 at the fifth annual Libre Graphics Meeting (LGM). Held in a historical piano factory, newly renovated into a lively exhibition and work space near Brussels' city center, LGM 2010 offers software developers, artists, designers and other graphics professionals the chance to collaborate and learn from each other. LGM emphasizes the sharing of collective creativity, innovation and ideas and is free for everyone to attend. The LGM community is excited for the opportunity to bring this event to the European capital.

About the Libre Graphics Meeting

The Libre Graphics Meeting exists to unite and accelerate the efforts behind Free, Libre and Open Source creative software. Since 2006, this annual meeting is the premiere conference for developers, users and supporters of projects such as GIMP, Inkscape, Blender, Krita, Scribus, Hugin, the Open Clipart Library, and the Open Font Library gather to work on interoperability, shared standards, and new ideas. Work at prior LGMs has pushed the state of the art in important areas such as color management, cross-application sharing of assets, and common formats.

Face-to-face meetings and opportunities for collaboration are important to users and developers alike; in the form of tutorials, talks, workshops, and birds-of-a-feather (BOF) the event offers many formal and informal opportunities to interact.

Highlights from LGM 2009

The last Libre Graphics Meeting took place in Montreal, Canada. It involved 150+ participants from around the world working together for four days to give presentations, demos, and meet informally. Through support from the École Polytechnique Montréal, the LGM user community (raising money on pledgie.com), Sourceforge, River Valley Technologies, Intel Communities, Open Candy, QT, sK1, GIMP, Python Software Foundation, Gnome foundation and Group Eyrolles, the conference funded travel for many international developers whom otherwise would not be able to work face to face. Highlights included contributions by companies building on Open Source such as AscenderCorp and Open Source Publishing, and presentations of Jeff Fortin’s PiTiVi Video Editor, FontMatrix, Phatch and Michael Terry’s work on In-Gimp user-experience analysis and kinetic templates. All major projects in attendance, Scribus, Gimp, Inkscape, and Open Font Library, spent time planning activities for the next year. New projects like the panorama stitcher NONA, Lighttwist, a system for running multi-projector immersive video displays, and Markus Weiland's FacetZoom widget, set the stage for new exciting software developments leading into LGM 2010 in Brussels.

A Preview of LGM 2010

For Libre Graphics Meeting 2010, the conference promoters challenge all participating projects and people to set goals and plan creative projects. First, each major project is requested to have set three solid priorities before the conference to work towards. Second, one or more collaborative projects is to be developed, beyond just the tools used, such as a book or animation. And third, the conference hopes to involve an increasing number of artists and academics to show novel uses libre graphics software, and to discuss, analyse and provide inspiration.

In the coming months, Libre Graphics Meeting 2010 organizers will release more information about the upcoming conference, raising funds to enable the event, and release the official call for participation for 2010. Immediately, the conference organizers invite all interested in participating to watch the http://libregraphicsmeeting.org website and join the Create Project (http://create.freedesktop.org) mailing list and get involved.

LGM 2010 is hosted by the Libre Graphics Community and Constant in collaboration with De Pianofabriek, Master Networked Media and Research programme Communication in a Digital Age (Piet Zwart Institute, Willem de Kooning Academy, Rotterdam) and the Bruxelles Linux User Group (BXLUG).

For more information, visit http://www.libregraphicsmeeting.org

Press Contact

* Sponsoring Organization: Create Project and Libre Graphics Meeting * Contact: Jon Phillips * Contact email: jon@...87... * Phone (USA): +1.415.830.3884 * Website: http://libregraphicsmeeting.org/ * Press Release in other languages: http://ur1.ca/a33b * Press Photos: http://ur1.ca/a34y

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