Just a quick report to say we held our FAVE gathering at the Trinity centre in Bristol on Saturday. It was most successful. I would like to apologise to the fair number of people I failed to get back to and the lack of streaming. It's the first event we've actually put on ourselves here and we have lots to learn. I was most impressed with the amount of information our speakers managed to fit in to their 30 minute slots. Chris O'shea started us off with an intriguing glimpse into tangible interfaces for audio visual environments. Tom chance from Remix Reading gave a lightning overview of libre licensing and the possibilities of co-creativity. John Ffitch gave us a short form intro to Csound and Michael Sparks introduced the BBC's open source network testing platform called Kamaelia. That was just the morning session. After lunch Rich Bown gave us a quick tour of Rosegarden followed by an inspirational testimony from James Wallbank about the ways in which Access Space in Sheffield has promoted creativity using open-source software for over 5 years, through artist residencies, workshops, events and exhibitions. Plugincinema.com followed with an equally inspirational talk on web-film making and open-source cinema as an alternative to Hollywood. For our last presentation, RachelAPP demonstrated how to record and mix a track using Ardour, how to program drums on Hydrogen and how to master the final track using JaMin from a refreshingly non-technical perspective. We rounded off the day with musical performances from Andy Preston, RachelAPP, Matt Gray, Jonny Stutters and Dave Griffiths. Dave's highly visual live coding style was particularly fascinating to watch as well as listen. It was a very full day as you can see. It provided us with a great chance to do some local networking and most importantly we achieved what we set out to do and covered costs without any external funding. I think everyone came away feeling very inspired and it seems like we have done a good pilot for an Open Source Audio and Video users' event, which has every chance of continuing and growing. Many thanks to everyone who took part and contributed to such a great event. -- cheers, tim hall http://fave.org.uk irc.freenode.net#fave http://glastonburymusic.org.uk/tim
