How to travel the intergalactic way - a Free Software trip to Kiel

As every year on the third Saturday in the month, the Software Freedom Day also took place this year of course. One of the places you can go on that day is the Kieler Linuxtage which took place on the 18th and 9th of September this year.

Since 2010 I'm having a small trip from Hamburg to Kiel to represent the Free Software Foundation Europe there with a small booth. In 2014 there was also a talk about the FreeYourAndroid campaign, this year I even extended this and, beneath the talk, introduced F-Droid to the visitors in a small workshop.

As you see, things are developing, even the Fellowship Meetings in Hamburg grow (our last meeting on the 14th of September hosted 9 people!). Lately in August we had a new guy around who moved from Darmstadt to Hamburg and he said he would join me for the trip to Kiel. So this year I wasn't travelling to Kiel alone for the first time. A big thanks to Pascal [2] for supporting me - and in special for supporting the FSFE and Free Software!

In fact, without Pascal I wouldn't have had that much to tell about the applications which you can get in F-Droid as he pointed out a lot of apps to get there and supported the workshop as well.

At such Free Software events you really learn what the term "Community" means, you even meet guys from the local Freifunk in Kiel where you find a place to stay for the night - well, in fact, this bed was reserved for Edward Snowden, but as he wasn't there that night… - you see…

The local hackers from Kiel called Toppoint are even great as well, they have the possibility to create intergalactic traveller's passports for you. As I already had one, I created an intergalactic diplomatic
passport this year, originally in blue and you can trust - this is a real document with security hints in it which you can only see in the black light! Here are some pictures of it:

All in all, we can say this was a small but nice successful free software event and I am sure I will go there for the next five years (at least) as well.

By the way, you are welcome to join us at one of our FSFE Fellowship Meetings in
Hamburg.

Software Liberty is like Security in IT…

… it's a progress, not a state. If you work on it, you have it. If you don't, you probably are going to lose it. Thus, sometimes it is necessary to do one step forward to feel complete and feel that you are someone doing at least something small for the development of free software.

One thing you can do is to be present on conferences with a booth for a project and probably also giving talks for the masses about topics people are most likely interested and concerned to.

Few days ago I was at the Kieler Linuxtage, a small but nice conference in Northern Germany. Result was a small booth for the Free Software Foundation Europe - as every year. What's new is, that I was giving a talk there. - I really didn't do that for almost four years now.

The talk is about free software on Android Phones - in special the alternative app store called F-Droid - and the FreeYourAndroid campaign which is powered by the FSFE.

If you are interested and understand the German language quite well, than you will find some stuff on the Youtube Channel of the Kieler Linuxtage, including a talk about FSFEs FreeYourAndroid campaign.

Thanks very much to Torsten to start the campaign and also for preparing the slides, of course. ;-)

Grazer LinuxTage 2012

I have to admit: I love to be an engineer, to dive into issues and forget the time and everything around me until a problem is solved. This is good for the people having the technical problems which I solve then.

Now I learned why this is not good for organizing booths for free software events - alone. Not getting around to order posters or rollups for a booth in time lead to a strange presence of Fedora on Grazer Linuxtage. :)

You most likely know the sticker I used to improve the Austrian Tux. I had just those small things like buttons, stickers and DVDs with me in Graz, so I had to be a bit more creative...

The booth, however, was small but fine and quite well visited. I didn't expect that much of visitors before. The stories I heard of the event did let me think this will be a small event, so it was an awesome experience to see that I didn't had any of the Fedora Media, Christoph sent me, around, already at the half of the day. The other half didn't get boring because of that though. There still were a lot of Fedora Fanboys taking stickers and buttons with them and visitors asking the "usual" questions about the relationships between Fedora and RedHat and when the next release will come up and so on. Not to forget the jokers, who were asking for the pretended confusion between the Fedora and Facebook logos, of course...

A tip for any other Fedora Ambassador who is going to supervise a booth on an event some time: I think one reason that I had that much visitors at the booth without having big posters and such stuff around was, that I actually was *standing* next to or before the booth without a notebook. It is important to show that you are there for answering questions, not for hacking.

It was a good decision to get into an airplane for the second time in my life, to travel Hamburg-Frankfurt-Graz-Munich-Hamburg on just one weekend, even if I'd expected that there are Austrian Fedora Ambassadors as well who maybe are interested in supporting a Fedora Booth in Graz.

The weather in Graz was just great! 27°C, blue sky and sunshine all around.I got riled about myself because I missed to ask for vacation for the Monday after. The Tuesday after was a holiday in Germany anyway, so this could have gotten a really long weekend in Graz.

Beneath a quite nice view to the Alps from above when getting there, it was also a pleasure to meet the free software family again after a long time as well as a lot of new free software contributors and interesting people on the event.

It also was interesting to learn about the Austrian organizations who care about political issues concerning free software and data retention stuff and so on. Now I understand a bit better what it means that a lot of these topics are European topics.

Since I already arrived there on Friday afternoon and was flying back on Sunday, there was a lot of time around the actual event on Saturday to get in touch with the people. On Friday I was helping out with preparations for the event and was lucky to see that the organizators had table cloth for *every*
project booth (thanks for your efforts anyway, gnokii ;) ).

Saturday morning when I went to the event I already met Michael, who was taking care of the LPI booth which was right between the boothes of Debian and Fedora. To the left of the Fedora booth there were the guys of Gentoo and one distribution I didn't knew of before: OpenArtist is intended to be used by musicians and graphic designers. Interesting that the whole distro is chiefly maintained by just one person.

On Saturday evening a social event took place where exhibitors and organizators where invited. You have to know that the creators of GRML are member of the organization team and Zsh
geeks as well. You can imagine this was a very nice evening if you're a bit nerdy. ;)

On the sunday morning after we met again for a brunch with the people who organized the event. The restaurant had a really big backyard, so we could enjoy the coffee out of the doors in the green with the nice weather. A bummer that I had to leave that early to get my flight back to Hamburg with
a longer stop in Munich because the captain pilot was in the cantine and forgot that he already should sit in an airplane...

P.S. For the same reason I was introducing this post with, this report actually took almost two more weeks to actually get written down. ;)

FSFE-Booth at Software Freedom Day Hamburg

A photo log:

Software Freedom Day 2010, Hamburg

18. September 2010. Die Welt im Ausnahmezustand. Nerds versammeln sich zum Rudelgucken. Vorträge über das Arbeiten mit der Kommandozeile; Hintergrunddienste die Musik abspielen, Texteditoren und reguläre Ausdrücke sind an der Tagesordnung (Die ganze Galerie, danke, Sven).

Selbst die FSFE war unter den Ausstellern mit einem Stand vertreten und hat dabei wieder die Aufmerksamkeit mit Flyern, netten Accessoires und Kleidungsstücken auf sich gelenkt. Selbst bei Vorträgen haben engagierte Leute heimlich das Logo oder die Internetadresse vor die Kamera gebracht.

Wie man so einen Rummel um ein paar Bits und Bytes machen kann? Ganz einfach: Free Software, Free Society.

(Ja, ich gebe zu, dieser Blog-Eintrag ist einzig und allein um Bilder zu zeigen, die beweisen dass Nerds soziale Kontakte pflegen, Freiheit lieben und sogar politische Arbeit leisten, und das nicht gerade wenig. Und wenn die SD-Karte in meinem Handy nicht genau in dem Moment, in dem ich es mit dem Rechner verbunden habe, angefangen hätte zu erzählen, sie wäre kaputt, hätte ich vielleicht sogar mehr davon. grml.)

OpenRheinRuhr 2010 kündigt sich an

Seit ca. zwei Wochen ist es bekannt: Die OpenRheinRuhr wird dieses Jahr wieder stattfinden. Das Event mit Messe und Kongress um Freie Software im Ruhrpott - auch liebevoll "Ein Pott voll Software" genannt - wird am 13. und 14. November im Rheinischen Industriemuseum in Oberhausen stattfinden. Einige nicht ganz unbekannte Projekte sollen sich schon als Aussteller angekündigt haben. Die Spatzen pfeifen hier von den Dächern, dass es morgen auf dem Identi.ca account der OpenRheinRuhr noch mehr Informationen diesbezüglich geben soll. Außerdem soll in den nächsten Tagen wohl der Call for Papers offiziell gestartet werden. Hier lohnt es sich gespannt zu bleiben. Sobald es Neuigkeiten von der OpenRheinRuhr gibt, werde ich selbstverständlich schnellstmöglich davon berichten.

Day against DRM - AG FLOSS fragt nach euren Ideen

Am 4. Mai ist Day against DRM. Die AG FLOSS der Piratenpartei Deutschland ruft dazu auf bundesweit Aktionen an diesem Tag zu machen. Die AG freut sich auf kreative Ideen und Vorschläge, beispielsweise DRM-geschütztes Killerschach.



Herzlichen Dank für die Aufmerksamkeit.

Ich kann eure Dokumente nicht lesen

Ich kann eure Dokumente nicht lesen. Aber das wird sich ändern. Am 31. März 2010.

I love Free Software - Show your love!

Politischer Abend mit der FSFE am 27.01.2010, 19:30 Uhr in Düsseldorf

Das Düsseldorfer Fellowship der Free Software Foundation Europe lädt am 27. Januar 2010 ab 19:30 Uhr zu einem politischen Stammtisch. In Vorbereitung auf die Landtagswahl in Nordrhein-Westfalen am 9. Mai 2010 sollen an diesem Abend mit Vertretern verschiedener Parteien Fragen rund um Freie Software, Urheberrecht, OpenAccess, Freie Software in Schule und Verwaltung u.a. diskutiert werden. Hierzu laden wir alle Interessenten herzlichst ein, an den Diskussionen teilzunehmen.

Neben einigen Piraten aus Düsseldorf und Umgebung hat sich bereits auch Die Linke angekündigt dort zu erscheinen. Je nachdem wie viele Vertreter der anderen Parteien dort erscheinen werden, wird dieser Abend eine interessante Diskussionsrunde mit Stammtisch-Atmosphäre, oder spontan zu einer Podiumsdiskussion.

Die Treffen des Fellowship der FSFE finden jeden letzten Mittwoch im Monat ab 19:30 in der Friedrichskrone, Kirchfeldstr. 85, 40215 Düsseldorf statt [1]. Das Büro der FSFE befindet sich umliegend in der Talstraße 110.

Die Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) ist eine nicht gewinnorientierte und in einigen Staaten als gemeinnützig anerkannte Nichtregierungsorganisation, die für Freie Software eintritt. Für die Sicherung einer gleichen und gerechten Teilhabe aller an der Informationsgesellschaft ist es entscheidend, dass jeder die Freiheiten hat, Software zu benutzen, zu studieren, weiterzugeben und zu verändern. Ziel der FSFE ist es, durch ihre Aktivitäten das Verständnis und die Unterstützung für Freier Software in der Öffentlichkeit, Politik und Gesetzgebung maßgeblich zu verbessern. Der Einsatz und die Entwicklung von Technologien, die ihren Nutzern diese Freiheiten gewähren, wie zum Beispiel das GNU/Linux Betriebssystem, wird von der FSFE gefördert und unterstützt.

http://www.fsfe.org/index.de.html


[1] http://www.stadtbranchenbuch.com/duesseldorf/1220537.html