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Some Berlin Time
Much of the time I work from home for the Freedom Task Force, which is the “legal department” of the Free Software Foundation Europe. It’s nice to work from home, although my colleagues know that that also means long lunches (picking kids up from school, feeding them, bringing them back) and occasional emergency stops. On the other hand it also means that I can go on til all hours of the night if needed. (I won’t claim that’s always efficient — if I wanted to be efficient I might follow Isabel Drost’s lifehacking approach).
But sitting at home is not always the best thing to do: it’s lonely (at least as far as those colleagues are concerned) and it can be difficult to bounce ideas off one another. No matter how much VoIP and Jabber and whatnot we throw at it, nothing really beats a planning session over lunch (except maybe one over dinner + drinks). In addition, it’s fun to sit together and just get work done: that’s the old “hey, look, I just fixed bug #17!” approach which works well at software sprints and which conveys progress so well.
And let’s not forget the benefit of having someone watching over your shoulder, to prevent unfortunate cake-recipe posts and the like.
So, with all that in mind, I’m in Berlin this week for a few days of intense FSFE office time. I’ll be working with Matthias on website things, Karsten on planning and sales and Hugo on legal things. Evenings will probably be a little more KDE-themed as a way to unwind — when visiting the Kapital of Germany I might as well, and anyway I owe Claudia a lovely home-cooked dinner. One KDE thing in particular is going over the Fiduciary License Agreement that KDE e.V. uses and providing better guidelines for its use and administration — as well as checking that it still matches the policies used. That’s one of the cases where work-work and volunteer-work collide (in a pleasant fashion).
So, Berlin. See you around (well, at the office, which is in Linienstrasse).