Last weekend, September 2nd to 4th, we organised the first ever FSFE summit to bring together our pan-European community and Fellows for a whole weekend. A conference as a gathering, with the potential to build bridges and band together.
The FSFE summit was part of the QtCon, an event where people from different communities – Qt, KDAB, KDE, VLC – and our friends and community from the FSFE came together under one roof to get in contact with each other, to share skills and knowledge. All of this in a welcoming environment that offered a lot of space for all of us.
Looking back, one of the greatest things to hear, multiple times, was about people who came for the FSFE summit and then went to a technical talk about Qt or KDE once in a while. And about Qt developers that came and said it is great to have the chance to hear a political talk and they were joining the FSFE summit from time to time. Mixing our different communities and sharing expertise rarely seemed so easy. Two of FSFE’s local heroes turned out to be KDE contributors, just like one of our current community representatives, Mirko Böhm. Many VLC contributors were joining the FSFE 15 years party and so many stories more that have to be told.
Our initial plan, to bring our communities together at the same event and under one roof, turned out to be happily accepted by the communities and visitors of QtCon. Thanks for everyone who made this event possible, the countless volunteers and the participants. Seeing all of you bringing this event to life was fantastic.
For those who could not have been with us, be patient: We like to set up a page to bring together the records of the talks, slides and pictures. But before this is done, I can already highlight the record of our keynote speaker Julia Reda, Member of the European Parliament, who explained how “Proprietary Software threatens Democracy”.
And there is so much more to come. I am especially looking forward to the records of our community tracks. I have seen a lot of participation in “live” and I am sure there is more interest out there by people who could not make it to the FSFE summit.
Your help needed
If you have been to the FSFE summit, please help me in evaluating and in archiving the summit for the future. You can do so by sharing links, pictures, videos or by leaving your feedback. The links and pictures will be used to set up a page to share the summit with those who have not been here and for yourself as an archive. Your feedback will be used for our evaluation and as input if we are going to plan a second edition of the summit.
Please upload your pictures/videos here:
Be aware, that we like to publish some of them on our page under CC-BY 4.0 or CC-BY-SA 4.0. If you have a preference please let us know. Also, when you upload your pictures, do not forget to let me know who the author is! The easiest way to do so, would be to put your pictures in one container with your name as container-name.
And please also give us your feedback! You can either send an email to summit16@fsfe.org or if you prefer “anonymous”, you can write/copy your feedback into this etherpad:
I know, that writing into a pad is not really anonymous but a good step into it, compared by sending it via email.
Last but not least, if you have any links to share about the summit – from your personal blog, from your favorite news magazine, from your social media buddy … – please help us to collect them in this pad:
Titanpad to collect links and information
Finally, thanks to the QtCon and its organisers to host the first FSFE summit. It was a pleasure working with you!
And as long as we do not yet have the FSFE summit page to look back, find some of my pictures below to get a first impression:
These pictures are licensed CC0 (Public Domain) by Erik Albers