Skills that were thought to be old fashioned relics of the 20 century, such as sewing, stitching, or needle point are still relevant in the 21st century thanks to the Arduino LilyPad. Massimo Banzi, co-founder of Arduino, talks about and displays some of their fascinating developments, which include the LilyPad, an electronic component made to be sewn into fabric with needle and thread, rather than soldered, to facilitate the embedding of circuits.

Open Sen.se is a platform for experimenting with the interconnectivity of worldwide devices. Vahé Kassardjian, the company's co-founder gives an overview of the project, from its initial development to specific examples of its application. Describing the process as "going from the mental all the way to the metal", he shows how Open Sen.se is meant to do more than just track data and Vahé reviews how it can be implemented.

In the early years of personal computing, if you wanted a PC you had to build it yourself. That's how Lew Tucker sees cloud computing. Tucker thinks cloud computing is still in the do-it-yourself stage, but just like with PCs, Tucker believes a common architecture will emerge. For Tucker, that architecture is Open Stack, an open source collection of software that provides a set of services for cloud computing.

She had no professional background or experience, but was fully inspired when she sent her shot-in-the-dark email to NASA asking to volunteer. Their receptiveness launched Ariel Waldman into her mission to make space exploration more accessible to the public. In this presentation, she explains that engaging the public is not about corny, sci-fi costuming. It's about removing barriers so inspired people can explore, participate and spread their inspiration.

Peter Michalek is leading the the oX/OpenLynx effort, a scalable and comprehensive conceptual solution to support the needs of this next wave of computing. As described by Toby Considine, "plug'ins are used for each new control protocol (BACnet, ModBus, DNP, …) to be exposed in the oX server. This model distinguishes between the low level low voltage protocol used for each system and the information harvesting that one wishes to do in the wide world." Peter discusses the project and its current status and use.

Jay Phillips is technical lead and project manager of Adhearsion, an open source Ruby framework designed to make building voice- and telephony-enabled applications as straightforward as building web applications. He discusses a handful of technology trends that have paved the way for small and mid-sized development teams to create phone-enabled applications in a matter of days or weeks, not months.

Gabe Zichermann shares tips on how to use gamification techniques to increase end-user engagement in open source software. Gamification is the process of using game design techniques to solve problems in other domains that are not game related. Gabe is an entrepreneur, a blogger, an author and a gamification thought leader.

Our long-term interaction with the web will be defined by six trends. These trends will will involve dramatic changes that will make computing more like what we are used to seeing in many of today's movies. Kevin Kelly explains why he believes that soon the internet will beneficially surround us in ways that most users don't imagine today.

As stated on the MQTT website, MQ Telemetry Transport "is a machine-to-machine (M2M)/"Internet of Things" connectivity protocol." Meant to be used remotely particularly when bandwidth is at a premium, it can be used in both mobile and dial-up situations. Developed as part of his work at IBM, Andy Piper discusses the project, including its concepts and background. He also reviews examples of its use and reviews future development plans.

The issue of copyright continues to be a major problem over the life of the personal computer. Companies have consistently tried to limit the ability of users to make the most of their machines, using a variety of protection schemes. In his talk at the 28th annual Chaos Communication Congress (28c3), Cory Doctorow reviews the history of the copyright fight and discusses how developers and political organizations will continue to limit the use of the general purpose computer.