La Réunion des Communs 2023

Hey, I'm back home after 10 days at the Réunion des Communs, an event hosted at the library of Saint-Joseph on the Réunion island.

The Réunion island is a French island, located in the Indian Ocean, approximately 600km/400mi east of the island of Madagascar.

The event was about all the commons and a big part was about Free/Libre and Open-Source software and Free/Libre culture. Here is a quick report of what I did during the event.

The beautiful library of Saint-Joseph, with on the front the banner of the event.

The Talks

Over the full duration of the events (three days) I made two presentations: one about the project Pepper&Carrot and another one about the Free/Libre culture. The one about Free/Libre culture was an adaptation in French of a talk I gave for LibrePlanet in 2021 "How to free the imagination". I also gave two workshops about comics creation for local schools and four Krita workshops open to the public.

The library is exceptionally beautiful, I really liked one of the room for the talks. This one was on a terrace surrounded by endemics plants and trees. I took a photo of it while I was setting my computer early in the morning way before my talk.

One of the terrace for the talks.

The Comic Workshops

The comic workshop for the childrens of the local schools was a success. I had two classes of 25 childrens, split into 5 tables. I asked them to draw a short story in three panels. I wanted them to think about how they could surprise their readers by setting an end twist.

The two examples I prepared on the template for the workshop, simple stories with twists.

I guided them to imagine something that turned bad for a character in the first two panels, and then I asked them to think of an unexpected outcome − positive if possible.

All participants drew interesting comics and it was interesting to listen to their issues during the process and help them.

A table at my comic workshop inside the library, four other tables are off camera.

The Krita Workshops

Outside of the conferences and workshops for schools, I was full time around the six digital painting workstations. The six computers were running Krita 5.1.5 on Arch Linux, Gnome with medium sized Wacom Intuos tablets and it was very optimal to introduce Krita to many curious of all ages.

The Krita workshop, during a session to paint a sunset.

I had four Krita workshops on this room. I started each time by showing the general concept of Krita and the tablet. Then I painted a demo of a simple landscape reproducible with around 10 steps. After that, each participants were trying to reproduce the steps with a big room of course for their creative freedom.

The Krita workshop, during a session to paint a sunset.

A very good event

A big thanks to the hosts, the staff of the library, the teachers of the classroom, and the non profit orgs around this event too. I met amazing peoples. Thank you for the invitation to this "Réunion des Communs 2023"!

All in all, I had a very good time during this event. I could also enjoy good holidays with my wife, and friendly time with other participants and hosts at evening and that was perfectly timed before the start of the production of the future episode of Pepper&Carrot.

More infos: the blog of the CEMÉA.