Last weekend I was attending FSCONS, where I was giving a FreeYourAndroid-workshop as well as my first talk about FSFE’s FreeYourAndroid campaign. I have never been to FSCONS before and I was quite surprised by its familiar atmosphere. Some special fun came up with the Karaoke event at Saturday night, where in the end nearly the whole FSFE team was amusing itself as well as the rest of the conference.
FSCONS is co-organised by the FSFE, hence it was a great opportunity to meet Fellows from all Northern Europe at this conference. Beside other talks, I enjoyed a lot the talks given by Karsten @karsten Gerloff and Otto @otto Kekäläinen. The first one impressed by giving an easy to follow and free talk with just using a few slides. The latter one came up with very good insights on how big companies try to convince decision makers – and how you succeed best in counterarguing. Just the same day, Otto Kekäläinen also received the Nordic Free Software Award 2012 for his important contributions to Software Freedom.
My FreeYourAndroid workshop was on Friday, one day in advance of the conference. 16 attendees showed their interest, six of whom finally liberated their phone at the workshop. By the way, thank you, Bjarni Einarsson, for your help at the workshop. It was quite fun to see, how you brick and unbrick phones, just to liberate them in the end. Next year at FSCONS, you should think about giving a lightning talk on this : )
On Saturday I gave my talk about our FYA campaign. In contrast to the workshop, this talk did not so much concentrate on the technical side. The talk was about how FSFE runs this campaign, tools that are provided and aims that are to be achieved. Similar to my experience in Kosovo, after the talk people were interested in liberating their phones, asked me about how to do it and the message about FreeYourAndroid spread through the attendees of the conference. Hence, during the rest of the conference, every now and then someone asked me about more details of the campaign or how to liberate their phones. So I did a second, informal phone liberation workshop on Sunday, too.
Finally, a big thank you to Leif-Jöran @ellefj Olsson for all your endless efforts in organising FSCONS and making this event possible!