from Friday 13 November until Monday 16 November I was in Göteburg to join the Free Society Conference and Nordic Summit (FSCONS). The conference is a meeting place for people interested in social change, focused on the future of Free Software and free society. So what have we done there?
First of all Adriaan, Alina, Karsten, Karsten and Werner (both for FSFE and GNU), and myself participated at the GNU hackers meeting. Karsten and Adriaan both gave a talk about FSFE and the Freedom Task Force. It was very good to have so many GNU hackers in one place with whom you can talk and discuss. I was happy that we also shortly spoke about the future of Free Software, distributed systems, etc.
The next two days was full of interesting events. I was in charge of the
FSFE track which contained a workshop about the OpenPGP smartcard
by Martin, a presentation about
PDFreaders.org and
how to run campaigns as a Fellow by Hannes, and a presentation about
the Freedom Task Force from Adriaan. My task was to make sure that they
keep in time (what they did), and that they get a present (some good
chocolate)
afterwards so they are motivated to do it again next year :).
After the lunch break (all the food was vegetarian + the option to have it vegan!) Karsten gave a talk about "Free Software in Europe, Taking the Stock of the Public Sector". I did some last preparations with Andreas (ato), Hannes (h2), and Martin (gollo) for the workshops.
First workshop Hannes and I organised was about
PDFreaders.org. We had about eight people
participating at the workshop. We did not came to the point to really
plan our new activities for PDFreaders. But we have been able to explain
the general goal of this activity to the participants. And there was
some good
feedback which we will discuss in the pdfreaders team. Sunday evening
we all went to the social event which took place in an rock shelter with
a nice atmosphere. There Simon Josefsson got what he deserved... The
Scandinavian Free Software Award (Andreas took some pictures, hope to
have some online soon so you see what the award was.)
On Sunday Andreas and I started the website planning workshop. The goal
was to brainstorm how to improve FSFE's website. Although it took way
longer than planned it was a very productive workshop. We had many
important and good ideas
how to restructure the websites. Especially the menu structure and the
inner structure of the pages. Thanks to all participants. Of course
everybody interested in that topic is invited to read more about the
web team and join
FSFE's webmaster mailinglist. Andreas and I will soon sent
summaries to the list and continue with the process.
Beside that I had a lot of very interesting talks with several people at the conference and a lot of follow up to do. In fact I did not spend one minute without having talking about Free Software ;). On my personal scale the conference got 11 out of 10 points (you are also allowed to county binary here).
Thanks a lot to the organisers and participants, especially Jonas!
Matthias
Personal note: Patrik and Pontus, you're awesome ;)