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FSFE Newsletter - September 2011

New Intern surrounded by 800 geeks?

The first day in a new organisation always is quite intensive, many new people, procedures, so much information. Our new intern Eszter Bako it was even more intense. She spent her first day with FSFE at the Desktop Summit, surrounded by nearly 800 people talking about strange things such as KDE, Gnome, Qt, GTK, Plasma, Git, QML, D-Bus, or about how to build a toaster. For beginners the Free Software community can give a strange impression.

Good thing that she wasn't on her own. Our experienced intern Natalia Evdokimova, who organised our booth at the event, safely guided her through the day. Beside that there were many other FSFE activists: Our president Karsten gave a talk about "Free desktops for Europe's public sector" and founding member Bernhard talked about "Daily Melee: paid people within Free Software initiatives - How they tick, how to keep them and the art of behaving if you are one". Like you can see on our blog aggregation there were a lot of other Fellows present, including our former president Georg Greve.

Beside Eszter joining and Natalia leaving as intern, there are more changes within our team: Nicolas Jean's internship has now ended. He was one of the most active people in the web team, and we are happy that he will remain in our volunteers team as FSFE's webmaster. Diego Naranjo Barroso and Alessandro Polvani started their internships. Diego already contacted the Spanish Institutions for our PDFreaders campaign, and Alessandro will do the follow-up in Italy.

Digits to remember: 22-10-11 and 11-11-11

The Nordic Free Software Award is given to people, projects or organisations in the Nordic countries that have made a prominent contribution to the advancement of Free Software. Henrik Sandklef, our vice-president, asks you to submit nominations by email until October 22nd.

The award will be announced during the Free Society Conference and Nordic Summit (FSCONS) in Gothenburg, Sweden which will take place from Friday November 11th through Sunday November 13th. The conference is organised by FSFE's Swedish team, and your editor is responsible for FSFE's "Free Software in Politics" track there. We are looking forward to see you there. (Fellows will get a discount of 10 EUR on the standard rate).

Something completely different

• The importance of promoting Free Software, spreading Free Software in schools, and what role the computer sciences can play in relating the messages of Free Software to other institutions and disciplines: Read the latest Fellowship interview, in which our fellow Richard Shipman shares his thoughts on these topics.
• On Saturday 13th August Free Software activists came to FSFE’s PDF Readers Sprint in Manchester and found 59 previously unreported adverts for proprietary PDF readers, all of them on UK Council websites. Check out the report about the event done by Sam Tuke and Chris Woolfrey from our UK team.
• Computer Aided Design (CAD) software is critically important to a variety of industries and professions. It is also notorious for being poorly catered for by Free Software applications. Sam wrote a brief summary of the current situation.
• Support Ogg Vorbis by helping our sister FSF to reach 5.000 signatures for their petition, asking for This American Life in Ogg Vorbis. Also concerning Ogg, FSFE's UK team had a booth at the OggCamp2011.
• R-DIY Feminism Festival: FSFE will be represented at the DIY Feminism Festival in Manchester on September 3 and 4, holding events, including talks on Free Software philosophy, Free Software and women, and an Open Street Map workshop.
• Summer time was blogging time, so here some articles from the planet aggregation:
  • With our new intern Diego J. Naranjo Barroso's help Matija prepared the Free Software and law related links covering links about the the patents war, Google acquiring Motorola Mobility, and other stories in 1.8.-14.8. and 15.8.-21.8..
  • Timo Jyrinki writes about Free Software on mobile phones and the MeeGo Summit Finland including lots of pictures from the event.
  • Freedom Box: Read about the progress and technical details of the Freedom Box, in Bdale Garbee's report from DebConf11 in Banja Luka. If you are in the UK at the time, you can attend Sam's talk on Freedom Boxes in Manchester on 20 September 2011 at 19:00.
  • Interested in processing images from the command line? Swedish Team member Patrik Willard writes about how to do that for the FSCONS preperations.
  • Chris Woolfrey, who is doing the Fellowship interviews started blogging. His latest article is about the question, if all the data on your work computer count as company data".

Get Active: Software Freedom Day

September 17th is Software Freedom Day (SFD), a worldwide celebration of Free Software. Its goal is educational, teaching people why Free Software is the best choice when it comes to using Software. Organised and coordinated by the Software Freedom International, SFD invites everyone to participate and take action on a local level. Our Fellowship group in Vienna for example invits you to a Software Freedom Party. The evening will be opened by a talk about legal aspects in Free Software, held by FSFE's new legal coordinator Matija Šuklje. The groups in Bonn, Hamburg, and Manchester also have plans.

Contact existing groups to participate in events, or organise your own SFD activity!

Regards,
Matthias Kirschner - FSFE

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