Like in the 90ies but with phones - First Free Your Android installation parties

More and more people start using mobile phones with the Android. But in order to be in control over your phone, you have to install another Android firmware on them. To make phone liberation easy we started the Free Your Android campaign.

In FSFE's last newsletter edition we asked you in our "Get active" section to help us with Free Your Android installation parties, like the GNU/Linux installations parties some years ago. Thanks to all of you, who contacted us about it, and who offered their help for the future.

This month some of us already started with those installation parties. First, Torsten Grote tought Erik Albers and me how to free their phones, which I already documented quick and dirty. Second, on August 26th, 13 people from Austria, France, Germany, Slovenia, and Spain participated at FSFE's workshop. To summaries it in the words of Silke Meyer, one of the trainers:

"The workshop had two goals: To help people install free software on their phones and to develop/document some guidelines that trainers for such workshops could use."

Result: We liberated 4 phones, updated 3 to a newer version, documented what we did including our internal workshop documentation and, thought about stickers for liberated phones. Beside Silke's blog post, there is also a Spanish article with instructions.

We will have other Free Your Android workshops on 4th September in Katowice/Poland, on 9th September Pristina/Kosovo, and on 15th September in Berlin/Germany, Paris/France, and Lubijana/Slovenia. The campaign team's goal is also to make the update process easier. There is the Free Software "OTA Update Center" which can achive easy updates, but as Torsten desc9ribes, there are still some problems with it. Perhaps you, or someone you know can help with it?