After eight months of hard work, the Free Society Conference and Nordic Summit of 2008 has come to an end. With around 250 visitors, the conference attendance slightly exceeded our expectations, and it was a truly thrilling experience to be part of it.
Already in the preparation stages of FSCONS it became clear that we had something good and unique going. With the aim of making it a social event that bridges between the different movements working for digital freedom, we tried to construct a multifaceted but unified program that in large part emphasized the social aspects. In addition to the many wonderful speakers, this years conference included a great variety of social activities like workshops, codesprints, a music performance, copyright discussions and, of course, Free Beer. Most of the speakers we invited expressed a great interest in the event, even before it had started, and we had no problems recruiting a sufficient number of volunteers to help us make FSCONS happen.
Our initial decision to divide the speeches and workshops into eight different rooms had its advantages, but also made it very difficult to record every presentation. We did however manage to stream many of them live, and thanks to the hard work of the giss.tv crew, all the videos from FSCONS are already available at
http://giss.tv/dmmdb/fscons. In addition to videos, we have published the slides from many of our speakers at
http://fscons.org/slides and you can find links to all the films that were screened during the conference at
http://fscons.org/film-programAlthough the planning started as early as February, there were of course many things that didn't fall into place until right before the conference. Some of our ideas, like having a Creative Commons Concert in the evening, even had to be discarded, seeing that it was rather impossible to find a suitable concert venue in Gothenburg less than six months in advance. Having a very limited budget was probably our biggest concern though. With few initial sponsors and no idea how many visitors would come, we were unable to tell the speakers that they would have their travel costs covered, and every estimate involving money, like the amount of food and t-shirts, felt risky to say the least. Fortunately though, the conference turned out to be a success in the end, and we even ended up with a small surplus that will help us make the next FSCONS even better.
Many things need to be improved for next year, but all in all it went very well, and the response we received was overwhelmingly positive. We have already started preparations for next year's event and invite everyone to join the planning process by subscribing to our mailing list at
http://mail.fscons.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss. If you only want the major updates, we have a list for that too, at
http://mail.fscons.org/mailman/listinfo/announce.
I'm very happy to have been involved in such a wonderful event and hope to see you all at the next FSCONS.
