2025-09-27 –, D1
"Echtzeit - Digitale Kultur" (https://www.echtzeitkultur.org) is a small Swiss NGO created to aid the demoscene (https://demoscene-the-art-of-coding.net/the-demoscene). As many organizations, we wish to not further rely on the SaaS solutions by too-big-to-fail technology providers. With around 10 active and 100 passive members, our resources - time, money and capabilities - are severely limited. This talk presents how we built our own infrastructure based on FreeBSD, Jails, PF, ZFS and other OSS and goes into the challenges - some technical, but most organizational and financial - that we faced by this approach as well as the benefits. The talk further lays out how we wish to share our acquired know-how with other NGOs to enable them to gain digital autonomy themselves.
Mario has been an active contributor to the demoscene for over two decades. As a founding member of the demogroup mercury, as a member of the board of Echtzeit - the Swiss demoscene association and as a main organizer of MountainBytes. Switzerlands biggest demoscene event. He started his career in film production, visual effects and color grading but has slowly transitioned to Software Development and now works as a Security Architect for Financial Infrastructure in Zurich. He started working with FreeBSD in the 2010s when he developed a distributed AV-editing and encoding system for which FreeBSD was the ideal OS.