“Show Europe” and other specialties at the first FSFE summit

With just eight days left, the FSFE summit is very close. This week, we finalized the schedule and herewith I like to point out some specialties of our program and recall the initial idea behind the summit.

Let’s go back to the beginning of our thoughts: Initially, the idea of organizing a FSFE summit was to organize for the first time a main event that brings together FSFE members, friends and supporters from all over Europe. It should be free to attend, open to topics and nice to be at. Then, like a coincidence, just some weeks later we were invited to join the QtCon and since then we have been more than happy for this generous offer.
Being part of the QtCon for the FSFE is kind of symbolically as well. It is our chance to be part of a setting in that the FSFE summit is an integral part of a bigger event. An event, that includes four other communities and, with KDE and VLC, two prominent Free Software solutions. Such a setting feels in a way like the offline-realization of how the FSFE feels about its general and political role: an organisation that is deeply embedded inside the Free Software movement.

Show Europe

As a political organisation, we understand our role as servant and voice of the Free Software movement. In this understanding, at the summit, we look forward to offering other (national) Free Software related organisations to present themselves and their work in our “Show Europe” – no matter what European country or other legal jurisdiction you work in.
The “Show Europe” shall be a session to help the European Free Software movement to see connections, to strengthen ties, to collaborate and to see that we speak with many voices and languages but with the same message. As a special feature, to not distract our participants from this unique event, we explicitly do not let host other sessions during the Show Europe.
Happening: Sunday, September 4th, 13 – 14 hours, Room A3

Community sessions

Since the very first planning of the summit, we wanted to give our widespread community the possibility to connect, to share and to organise their very own activities and interests. Already during our Call for Participation, we reserved a decent amount of slots for our community members. And as we expect Friday to be uneasy for a lot of volunteers and community members to participate, we now set up the whole community program on Saturday and Sunday only.
Looking at the range of sessions, it turns out that most of our community sessions aim at teaching and growing teams or working groups inside the FSFE and its Fellowship. Means that we have various teams presenting themselves and how to participate. Hence, if you are looking to engage for FSFE, the summit is the event for you. It definitely gives you the best and most clearly overview of how to get active.
However, and beyond internal mobilization, we also have community sessions that aim at teaching general skills like advocacy or PR. Finally, Open Hardware seems to be another hot topic in our community.

15 years of FSFE

FSFE_15_Sticker_en_thumb As the FSFE summit will be the event in history so far, that gathers the most of our members, friends and supporters at the same time in the same location, we like to use this momentum of this community gathering to officially celebrate 15 years of FSFE. There will be a dedicated session during the second day of the summit, run by Jonas Öberg, Executive Director of FSFE. Like during our “Show Europe”, there will be no other event in the summit happening during this unique event.
After that, you are invited to directly join us in walking to the c-base, Berlin’s most famous hackerspace, to keep celebrating 15 years of FSFE. For this event, bring a good and chatty mood and your best friends. The only agenda point that is going to happen in here will be the awarding of some of FSFE’s countless and unpayable local heroes. All the rest is party!