How we celebrate "I Love Free Software Day" in Barcelona, Spain

Albert, from the Barcelona local group: BlueSystems, one of the companies employing people to do KDE work, opened an office in Barcelona a few years ago. At some point, people from that group said “Ok, we already know everyone in Barcelona that does KDE things, so let’s expand to Free Software and make new friends”, and that’s how Barcelona Free Software was born.

Since the original folks were from KDE, if some kind of official paperwork was needed, be it for renting something or getting a small grant or sponsorship, it was very easy to use the KDE España association. To this day KDE España still handles all the legal stuff for us. We are very grateful to them!

Albert: At this point I would say there are about four of us doing general coordination work and a similar amount helping when they can. The number of people who come to our activities is quite hard to measure, but I would say in a year we get around 100 different people attending.

Albert: We do a monthly meetup, except for the summer break in July and August. There we are focusing on a wide range of topics around Free Software and adjacent Free Knowledge and Free Hardware.

For example this last year we have had talks about VLC, about a CPU being developed in the Barcelona Super Computing Center, about a Free Software/Hardware combination to measure sports performance and many more.

This wide range of topics allows us to foster a thriving local community that welcomes both Free Software enthusiasts and curious newcomers, while at the same time attracting profiles from other communities with whom to carry out collaborations.

Albert: We first celebrated I Love Free Software Day in 2019, and it was quite a success; that year I think we even got a local company to sponsor part of the cost of food and drinks. We also learned that different people have different expectations and that while we had made it clear, at least we thought, that it was a “let’s socialize” event, we got a couple of people who left when they realized there was no presentation, so since that day we have tried to make sure there’s a good mix of “learning” and “socializing”.

Albert: 2021 was definitely a challenge since in Barcelona we still could not gather in big groups, so we did something online and I think it worked relatively well. The rest of the years we learned from our “mistake” from the first time in 2019, and we make sure there is a good talk at the beginning so people that want to learn more about Free Software get to do it and then a good part of socializing too, since we feel it goes very well with the “Let’s appreciate Free Software” focus of the “I Love Free Software Day” event.

Albert: We gathered at Akasha Hub, a Free Software friendly self-managed community; we did a small presentation about Free Software and used the game-like materials that FSFE had produced to test the knowledge of the attendees and learn some things we did not know about the big world of Free Software.

Albert: My main takeaways from the several years are:

1. Have a good mix of presentations/talks and socializing/party. Different people are going to want different things but if you have a good mix of both everyone will be relatively happy.
2. Make sure the place you’re doing the event is relatively easy to get to. We have not had this problem with the I Love Free Software Day events, but some of our other events were in “Go to this building, then to 7th floor and 3rd door on the left, and there you will find a sign and also you will need to give ID to the person at the door” and we definitely felt that attendance would have been better if the instructions to get there did not feel like an Escape Room game.
3. Confirm a few of the regulars will show up; this way if the event does not attract lots of new people, at least you still get to socialize with your usual friends.
4. Mention that there will be food, if you are having food; of course, do not lie if you do not :D. We make most of our events quite close to dinner time, and if potential attendees know there will be food they will be less stressed about having to find a plan for food in a part of the city they maybe do not know that well. In this regard we want to thank the FSFE for sponsoring food for the Barcelona event this past couple of years.

Albert: I truly believe in the power of saying “Thank You”. Free Software developers are usually in a loop of bug reports and feature requests by users. We as users often see what is broken or what is missing, so we will communicate that to the developers, usually failing to send a message of how awesome the software is. This is why celebrating I Love Free Software Day and taking the time to say “Thank you” to the developers and projects we depend on is important; we need to break the cycle of negativity that sometimes the developers of Free Software are stuck in.

Albert: We will most surely celebrate in 2026 too. We have not started planning yet, so if anyone from the Barcelona area wants to help, please talk to us!