OSCAL 2023 (Open Source Conference Albania)

FUSS is a distribution based on the Debian GNU/Linux. It includes all the software that is needed to create a computer lab: server, client and standalone machines, with centralized user authentication and home directories.

In this workshop we will demonstrate how it is installed (server, client, and standalone) and the most common usage cases (how to manage user accounts, how to manage a class, etc.).

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OSCAL 2023 Welcoming Speech

The key to better IT security of your government is transparency. This allows decision makers and citizens to determine easily how well their local and national government is performing. This session shows what that looks like in practice and how this practice was the driver of tens of thousands of security fixes and counting. Who wants to run this in Albania?

While the shrinking of civic space affects all civic actors, including restrictions on freedoms of expression, assembly, and association, Women Human Rights Defenders (WHRDs) face a disproportionate impact due to their historically limited access to civic space. Gender norms, inequalities, and violence that exist in the physical world extend into the digital realm, and WHRDs are targeted more frequently online due to their gender or public presence. Digital rights violations against WHRDs not only harm the individuals affected but also have implications for democracy, as they discourage WHRDs' participation in public life, stifle debate, and lead to self-censorship.

What’s a cloud and what goes in it? Come find out as we go in detail through the history and important role of open source software in powering the world’s digital infrastructure. Particular emphasis will be placed on Linux, OpenStack, and Kubernetes.

Most developers are aware of the term CI. It stands for Continuous
Integration. However most other hackers are not aware how it can help them in their
workflows.

How to build a Kubernetes cluster that can efficiently manage in addition to CPU and memory resources also GPU resources.

In this presentation, I will talk about the importance of contributing to open source and how to submit your first contributions.

WebXR has a long story in the making. What started as just something to test new technologies such as Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality has transformed into a frame where any such implementation is possible and it is promoted to do so. In this workshop, we will be talking about how to implement user interaction with 3 objects, how to create facial or location AR, what are the limitation at this stage and what can we expect to see in the future.

Fonts are important. Much of our communication relies on written words. And software
like GNOME. or your web browser, that are used all over the world needs to support
many scripts.

I will present an overview of font technologies, covering font files, their history and development,
and the software stack that is used to go from those files to the text you see on your screen.

The talk will be accessible to anyone with a general interest in typography and
graphics and should be interesting to application developers and anybody who
wants to get a better understanding of text rendering on Linux.

In an age defined by digital connectivity and information exchange, the value of personal data has grown exponentially. Between 2021 and 2022, a high volume of sensitive information about Albanian citizens fell into the public domain, potentially exposing individuals to privacy risks and security threats.

The intricate challenge posed by data leaks stems from the fact that in today's digital world, data serves a dual role – it functions as currency while also being a potential tool to perpetrate real-world harm, including identity theft and fraud.

Going beyond the political, economic, and social debate on data breaches, this workshop is dedicated to legal remedies available to Albanians under Albanian legislation. The focus will be to share knowledge of data-related rights and an overview of what claims Albanian citizens can raise to protect their data. Through an interactive session and practical case studies, participants will not only gain insight into the legal intricacies of data protection but also acquire actionable knowledge to navigate the aftermath of data breaches.

Within the scholarly publishing landscape, monographs are often considered as secondary to journals. Nevertheless, especially within the Humanities and Social Sciences, monographs remain the primary mode of scholarly communication and a core part of a scholar's research assessment basis.

Yet, the monograph publishing ecosystem has been slow to adopt and integrate open standards, including with regard to metadata, making them also less accessible to libraries, research aggregators, and academic institutions. Open metadata management and dissemination platform Thoth solves for these issues, giving both publishers an open source tool to manage and disseminate CC0-licensed metadata to a variety of repositories, and libraries and other third parties to ingest and access those data through an open API.

This presentation provides an overview of the design architecture and user interface of Thoth, its various outputs and APIs, and the ways in which Thoth is helping authors and open access publishers to improve their works' visibility in the scholarly publishing landscape.

In this talk we will talk about privacy and security issues of using centralized
social media platforms and proprietary software.
I will talk about the network effect, the fact that social networks (and use of
other software) are more useful if more people use it. It is necessary to grow the number of users of these technologies before any individual can enjoy the benefits of this software.
We, as an open source community, need to actively organize people to collectively start using decentralized and free and open source software. Creating local groups (hackerspaces) and events that will bring people together and use decentralized applications as main means of communication is the easiest way to give the users an immediate benefit of using these technologies.
I will mention some decentralized apps like Matrix,XMPP and Mastodon, and emphasize the importance of installing these apps even if we don't need to immediately have use for them.

Explaining how we used Free Software / Open Source / Open Data at different levels of Government in Kosovo.

Details how FLOSSK become a Local Chapter in OpenStreetMap and OSGeo.

In this workshop we will talk a bit about XMPP and its features, and why it is better than its alternatives. We will concentrate on the Snikket project philosophy and peculiarities, both on client and server side. We will describe briefly how easy the Snikket installation procedure is, and some of the required technical prerequisites.
Then the participants will be invited to join Snikket, and we will try messaging each-other and group messaging, explaining also the security features that are built into Snikket. Finally we will also see how to install Gajim on Linux, with flatpack, and how to use the same XMPP address that we have on Snikket.

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Cloud Compare is an Open Source software that allows for viewing and manipulation of 3D point clouds.

OpenStreetMap (OSM) is the largest crowd-sourced mapping effort to date, with an infrastructure network that is considered near-complete. The mapping activities started as any crowd-sourced information platform: the community expanded OSM anywhere there was a collective interest. Initial efforts were found around universities or hometowns of mappers. Events, such as natural disasters can also trigger a major update. The recent earthquakes in Turkey and Syria lead to a massive contribution by the Humanitarian OSM Team (HOT) of more than 1.7 million buildings in the region in less than a month after the event1. This type of activities result in a map that is of non-uniform completeness, with some areas having all building footprints in, while other areas remain incomplete or even untouched. Currently, with 560 million footprints, OSM identifies between a quarter and half of the total building footprints in the world, if we estimate that there are around 1-2 billion buildings in the world.

A global view on the local completeness of buildings in OSM did not yet exist. Unlike other efforts, that only look at a subset of OSM building data (Biljecki & Ang 2020; Orden et al., 2020; Zhou et al., 2020), we have used the Global Human Settlement Layer (GHSL) to estimate completeness of the entire dataset. The remote sensing dataset is distributed onto a grid of approximately 100x100 meter tiles. In each tile of the grid, the built area of GHSL is compared to the total area of OSM building footprints. The computed ratio is measured against a completeness threshold that is calibrated using areas that were manually assessed.

Using information derived from remote sensing datasets can be problematic: GHSL does not only measure building footprints: it includes any human-built structures, including infrastructure and industrial areas. Next to that, due to sub-optimal input data or failing algorithms, the dataset is not of the same quality as the crowd-sourced data in OSM in areas that are complete. Even with these limitations, a comprehensive global completeness assessment is created. The assessment should not be used as ground truth, but rather as reflection on the OSM building dataset as is and as a guideline for priorities for the future. Statistics on regional completeness can be created and the quality of GHSL could be assessed on countries that are considered to be complete, such as France or the Netherlands.

1 - https://www.hotosm.org/disaster-services/turkiye-earthquakes-february-2023-activation/

References
Biljecki, F., & Ang, L. M. (2020). Assessing Global OpenStreetMap building completeness to generate large-scale 3D city models In: Minghini, M., Coetzee, S., Juhász, L., Yeboah, G., Mooney, P., & Grinberger, A. Y. (Eds.). Proceedings of the Academic Track at the State of the Map 2020 Online Conference, July 4-5 2020. Available at https://zenodo.org/communities/sotm-2020 DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3922285
Orden, A., Flores, R. A., Faustino, P., & Samson, M. S. (2020). Measuring OpenStreetMap building footprint completeness using human settlement layers In: Minghini, M., Coetzee, S., Juhász, L., Yeboah, G., Mooney, P., Grinberger, & A. Y. (Eds.). Proceedings of the Academic Track at the State of the Map 2020 Online Conference, July 4-5 2020. Available at https://zenodo.org/communities/sotm-2020 DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3923033
Qi Zhou, Yuheng Zhang, Ke Chang & Maria Antonia Brovelli (2022) Assessing OSM building completeness for almost 13,000 cities globally,International Journal of Digital Earth,15:1,2400-2421,DOI: 10.1080/17538947.2022.2159550

SafoMeter is a platform for assessing safety in public spaces using an index-based evaluation system that combines objective safety indicators with subjective perceptions of safety. The methodology is piloted in the urban area of Prishtina, Kosovo, and involves field data collection using the mobile application Mergin to map data for objective indicators and gather user responses on perceived safety. Analysis is conducted using QGIS software to create a map that showcases safe and unsafe areas of the city, rated from 0 to 10, with 10 indicating the safest areas. The study results demonstrate that SafoMeter effectively identifies and visualizes areas in need of urgent safety interventions. The tool enables evidence-based decision-making for policymakers by utilizing geospatial data to identify specific locations that require interventions. SafoMeter provides a practical approach to assess safety in public spaces and guide place-based policies to enhance urban safety, particularly for marginalized groups.

The substantial reduction of disaster risk and life losses, a major goal of the Sendai Framework by the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR), requires a clear understanding of the dynamics of the built environment and how it affects, in case of natural disasters, the life of communities, represented by local governments and individuals. The framework states that communities participating in risk assessments should increase their understanding of efficient risk mitigation measures.

Earthquakes are threatening many regions in the world with constantly increasing risk due to rapid urbanization and industrialization. Earthquakes do not kill people, buildings do. Thus, the main threat of earthquakes comes from building damage and collapse. To improve resilience and preparedness, we need to estimate the risk, the possible damage of buildings and the related human and financial losses. This requires not only the position, size and class of buildings, but also the reconstruction value and the number of people inside the building at any time. For this, exposure models are used that translate the physical earthquake hazard to building damage, human and financial losses. Exposure models usually describe the built environment of administrative regions as groups (aggregates) of different building classes and their frequency.

We present our open, dynamic, and global approach to describe, model, and classify every building on Earth with the greatest level of detail. Our model is based on the building data from OpenStreetMap and engineering information from open exposure models, combining these two sources to a building-by-building description of the exposed assets. We retain the aggregated descriptions where the building coverage in OpenStreetMap is incomplete and describe every building separately where building data is available. Due to the near-real-time computations of our model, it directly profits from the growth of OpenStreetMap and with about 5 million buildings added each month (or approx. 2 per second), the areas of incomplete coverage are constantly shrinking, making way for our building-specific exposure model.

Here, we introduce shortly the earthquake phenomenon, how it affects the built environment, why a high level of detail is necessary for useful assessments of the impact and the consequences of earthquakes, how OpenStreetMap and other open data helps us to achieve this goal and how communities can benefit for the model for their own risk assessments.

Through this talk we aim to raise awareness on the importance of increasing representation of Albanian women in STEM, and start a discussion on how increasing representation helps fighting stereotypes and gender biases. During the talk will be discussed how open culture can contribute to increasing representation of women in STEM, and how organizations can contribute to this work.

In this thought-provoking talk, we confront the pressing challenge of how Artificial Intelligence (AI) threatens the very fabric of Wikipedia. As AI technology advances, it brings both promises and perils to this iconic open-source knowledge platform. [AI generated text]

Join us for an engaging and enlightening session at the Tirana WordPress Meetup, held as part of the OSCAL (Open Source Conference Albania). In this workshop, we will dive into the vibrant world of WordPress, a leading open source platform that powers millions of websites across the globe.

Wikidata is a collaboratively edited knowledge base that is used by Wikipedia and its sister projects. This talk will provide an overview of the key concepts and features of Wikidata, empowering participants to understand its fundamental principles and navigational tools.

Tirana has undergone significant urban development and transformation over the years, resulting in the loss of many historic structures. Preserving Tirana is a project aimed at the preservation and revitalization of the architectural heritage and cultural identity of Tirana, the capital city of Albania.

If you are a Wordpress developer, you already know how to host your sites somehow. In this workshop I will show yet another way, which might be easier, cheaper and more convenient for you. Some familiarity with Linux commands is required though.

Source: https://docker-scripts.gitlab.io/articles/wordpress-with-ds.html

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Launched by FSFE and embraced by Open Labs Albania, the PMPC campaign highlights open source's role in public software procurement. This presentation unveils campaign goals, local adaptation, its influence on the May 2023 elections and the next steps of the digital rights activists that were involved.

To unlocking a more equitable world, a global effort is needed to encourage and invest in the creation of digital public goods - open-source software, open data, open artificial intelligence models, open standards and open content. This is key to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. UNICEF is a leading member of the Digital Public Goods Alliance which is a multi-stakeholder initiative with a mission to accelerate the attainment of the sustainable development goals in low- and middle-income countries by facilitating the discovery, development, use of, and investment in digital public goods.

The "Wikidata and SPARQL Workshop" is a hands-on session designed to introduce participants to the fascinating world of open data and demonstrate the potential of Wikidata and SPARQL in various domains. The workshop targets individuals with little or no prior experience in working with these technologies.

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have emerged as powerful tools in addressing the pressing challenges of climate resilience and environmental protection. In an era of escalating climate change and ecological degradation, GIS provides a comprehensive framework for analyzing, visualizing, and managing complex geospatial data. This abstract explores the multifaceted role of GIS in enhancing climate resilience and safeguarding the environment.

Imagine a sophisticated word like intelligence being added to the joyful and free sounding phrase "open-source"?
The new weapon in every industry is OSINT, which is primarily utilized by law enforcement and hackers. The distinctive and cost-free design of OSINT makes it stand out.
It will be an exciting challenge to obtain information using free resources for threats, attacks, or fun research on someone.
What is OSINT in reality?, The OSINT's dark side? How is it used by an ethical hacker?

Come along and discover for yourself!

In the face of increasing disaster risks because of Climate Change (like floods and wildfires), Free and Open Source Software (FLOSS) that support mobility analytics can be powerful tools. They can help in establishing protocols to enhance disaster preparedness, response, and recovery, all while considering local knowledge.

In recent years, the scientific community has witnessed a paradigm shift towards Open Science, a movement that fosters transparency, collaboration, and accessibility in research. This talk dive into the realm of Neuropsychology, highlighting the pivotal role that Open Science principles play in advancing the field. Open Science it's reshaping the way we conduct research, collaborate, and share knowledge. This talk is dedicated to exploring the profound impact of Open Science principles within Neuropsychology.
Open Science encompasses a range of practices aimed at increasing transparency and accessibility in research. From openly sharing research findings to detailing experimental plans before conducting studies (preregistration), these practices enhance the credibility and reliability of our work.
One pivotal aspect of Open Science that's gaining traction is multiverse analysis. This innovative approach acknowledges that there are many valid ways to analyze data, and it's crucial to explore various paths to uncover the most robust results. By systematically testing different analytical approaches, researchers can minimize false positives and ensure the validity of their findings. By embracing Open Science principles, Neuropsychology stands to achieve greater scientific rigor, accelerate the pace of discovery, and amplify its impact on both the scientific community and clinical practice.

A supervised hacking session. Get familiar to tools, tactics and methodologies for analysing vulnerable online services.
During the workshop a vulnerable machine will be analysed together and you will be able to get hands on experience.
This workshop is suitable for beginners with solid basic Linux skills and interest into the offensive side of IT Security.

When you're good at sport you don't just sport. You train specific muscles, specific moves, probably according to a personalized training schedule. Maybe you even have a coach. As a security expert, hacking may be your sport. But do you have a training schedule? Or a coach? It turns out we hardly practice specifically coding by pure practice but often just learn on the job although pure practice can be very effective. In this talk, we'll look at coding as a sport and check out how you can best train and live to bring out the best in yourself! Specifically I'll focus on python and exploit code.

In this presentation, we explore the pivotal concept of Secure Boot—a vital defense against unauthorized software compromising system integrity during startup. Delving into cryptographic foundations, implementation strategies, and real-world applications, attendees will grasp how Secure Boot thwarts threats and strengthens digital security. Join us to navigate the core of Secure Boot and its far-reaching impact on modern computing.

The Internet was born on a research and education environment, where trust was taken for granted. The trust and security layer was missing from it. Then it spread to the wild world and was used for all kinds of things (for everything) and this missing feature became evident. Attempts to fix it were made, with username and password, federated authentication, encryption, and all sorts of tools and technologies. But soon was realized that each of these solutions had its own problems. Self-Sovereign Identity is a fundamentally different design of how trust and authenticity should be established on the digital world. Trust Over IP is the foundation that steers and coordinates the work for developing standards, protocols, tools and solutions for making the digital world trustworthy. It is part of the Linux Foundation.

Slides: https://dashohoxha.gitlab.io/slides/making-internet-trustworthy/

In the recent months we have witnessed increased discontent with traditional social networks. Space Karen's acquisition of Twitter has exposed (again) the fragility of relying on corporate owned digital infrastructure for your personal online identity and also for public services. The backlash has already gotten people looking to independent alternatives like Mastodon and other software that are part of the so-called fediverse, the federated network of social media apps that communicate with each other via the ActivityPub protocol. Eventhough endorsement has largely remained within the tech-savy community, the tendency looks promising, already creating a movement of people endorsing and promoting independent and federated social media, and also news agencies and government institutions embracing the approach. But the fediverse is not ideal either: although it has its advantages to the corporate owned, algorithm-driven, ad-littered social web, it still requires you to trust the admin who owns the server and their moderation policy, and hope they don't shut down unexpectedly or get defederated by other servers.
Is there a way to be totally in control of our online identity? This presentation will introduce the concept of IndieWeb, the people-focused alternative to the corporate web, and the ways it can help us reclaim our online identity. We will look at what this movement stands for, explore ways to create your own website, host it in a server of your choice, and other features of sociability and discoverability like rss, microformats, webmentions, POSSE, webrings etc. The hope is to spark some inspiration and creativity, to make more informed and independent citizens of the web, thus making the web a more free, open, and resilient place.

In today's days, especially with the rise of AI, there are a lot of concerns articulated by scholars, like online privacy issues, surveillance capitalism, the spread of fake news and misinformation, etc. Among them, algocracy remains the less mentioned and consequently the less elaborated topic. Algocracy is a term that refers to a form of government or governance system where power and decision-making authority are primarily or exclusively exercised by algorithms or automated systems, rather than human beings. In the era of automatization, algocracy is posing a significant threat to the legitimacy of decision-making processes, making it a threat to democracy and the public sphere. The presentation aims to make an introduction to algocracy and some cases in real life. Being aware of this phenomenon and its potential risks, we can think from a non-conventional perspective to resist and abolish this threat.

If y'all think that installing cameras in bedrooms is just a fantasy or a distopian scenario, i'm unpleased to tell you that this was a real plan of one of the biggest coorporations in the world.

OSCAL 2023 Closing Speech