FSFE Newsletter June 2018
Erik AlbersJoin us at the FSFE's community meeting during LSM2018
From July 7 to 9, the FSFE will run its annual community meeting in conjunction with the Libre Software Meeting in Strasbourg, France. On the weekend of July 7 + 8, we are very excited to run a track, set up with speakers of our community and friends to cover several burning topics regarding Free Software. Our track covers business topics like marketing for Free Software and funding Free Software projects as well as policy topics from tinkering in Brussels to success factors for Free Software implementations in public services as well as contemporary important issues regarding diversity in Free Software, software freedom in the cloud, and many more. You can find an overview of our topics on the dedicated wiki page.
On July 9, we invite our community to join us for a full day agenda to bond and prepare for the next months. The meeting will include "Open Space" methods, an "Ask us anything" session as well as room for reflections on our current activities and well-being.
Throughout the event, we will run FSFE assembly, similar to the one during CCC, CCCamp and SHA camp. This assembly can serve as a place for our community to simply come together and get to know each other or to start and work on common projects.
Introducing the FSFE's CARE team
The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) and its community aim to offer a friendly and peaceful environment for every participant at FSFE events, online and offline. To this end, the General Assembly 2017 adopted an overall Code of Conduct for the FSFE. To ensure its availability and enforcement, we created a central CARE team. If you have experienced or became aware of behaviour contrary to the principles guaranteed in this Code of Conduct, please bring such incidents to the attention of your respective local or our central CARE team as soon as possible.
The central CARE team may be reached via e-mail at care@fsfe.org but you can also contact members individually. This is possible with encrypted email and in six languages. Rest assured that your messages will always be handled confidentially.
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What else have we done? Inside and Outside the FSFE
- Following more than a decade long tradition, the FSFE once again led its annual Free Software Legal and Licensing Workshop (LLW) in 2018: a meeting point for world-leading legal experts to debate issues and best practices surrounding Free Software licences.
- The Technology Transfer Centre (CTT) is an initiative run by the Spanish government whose goal is to facilitate sharing and reuse of software and services among public administrations. To shed light on this best practice, we have conducted an interview with Elena Muñoz Salinero, head of the CTT, to ask her about the legal, political, and technological background of the CTT.
- The mission of Software Heritage is to collect, preserve, and make readily available the source code of all software ever written, to help preserve the knowledge embedded in software source code, and make it widely available. Since June 7, the Software Heritage archive is open to the public.
- Diderik von Wingerden started a list of public bodies in Europe and in particular in the Netherlands, that publish their self-developed software as Free Software.
- vanitasvitae blogged a first evaluation of his research about how the size of OpenPGP encrypted messages grow.
- Daniel Pocock proposes to offer an annual award for non-technical non-profit organizations, who demonstrate exemplary use of free software in their own organization.
- The FSFE simplifies membership procedures for contributors by removing the Fellowship seats. In future, access to membership of the FSFE shall be facilitated through the normal membership procedures for active FSFE contributors.
- On Friday morning, one of our servers had a fatal hardware crash. This affected parts of our mail infrastructure and mailing lists. By now, all services are back to normal. At the same time, we modernised large parts of the mail infrastructure, for instance anti-spam measures. This also involves a change in our SMTP setting for people using this service: From now on, we will no longer accept mails delivered to port 25 from mail clients. Please make sure to use port 587 if you would like to send emails, and make sure the settings in your email clients match our recommendations.
- The FSFE, represented by Matthias Kirschner, Max Mehl, and Erik Albers, gave talks about technical sovereignty, digital sustainability and "Public Money? Public Code!" in Darmstadt, Berlin, Paris, and Madrid.
- The FSFE community ran booths at FOSS Backstage and Maker Fair in Berlin, Germany and at OpenExpo in Madrid, Spain.
FSFE is hiring
We are looking for a programme manager for our policy work. Our main policy topics cover Free Software and Open Standards issues on the EU and member state level. We work together with the European Commission and Parliament, as well as with politicians and civil servants in EU countries. This work is either done directly by staff or together with volunteers, as well as other Free Software and digital rights associations around Europe.
The person will work 35 hours per week with our team in the FSFE's Berlin office. There will be coordination with remote staff and volunteers, as well as regular travels to Brussels and other countries. If you are interested, read more details in our job announcement.
Contribute to our newsletter
If you would like to share any thoughts, pictures, or news, send them to us. As always, the address is newsletter@fsfe.org. We're looking forward to hearing from you!
Thanks to our community, all the volunteers, supporters and donors who make our work possible. And thanks to our translators, who enable you to read this newsletter in your mother tongue.
Your editor,
Erik Albers
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