ben @ fsfe

The evening of Thursday 7th April saw the inaugural meeting of fellows in the Free Software Foundation Europe’s British branch. Generously hosted by MaDLab, Manchester’s donation-dependent community space, the attendees opened discussions on how we might move free software forward here in the UK.

Rather than simply write out the meeting minutes I thought it may be useful to share my thoughts on the conversations that followed the only structured item, a useful introductory presentation from Sam about the fsfe in general. So:

• With regards to promoting this new group, places where material would not be ignored or discarded is difficult. Community spaces like MaDLab were well identified, particularly those used by local tech. groups. General public spaces like libraries I feel may be wasted effort given their already-saturated notice areas: perhaps academics may identify or appreciate more our ideas, practices and politics?
• Proper conversations preface leaflets. (Enough said there, I think.)
• I’ll be asking my Linux user groups about their opinions (and use) of FS. I’ll mention the recent meet and encourage discussion, any attendance or issues with the FSFE. I may point out that not once did we discuss any software per sé, but how we can encourage its use.
• Users of StatusNet/identi.ca and Twitter could help out with our accounts to push blog posts or headlines. We already see a number of interesting posts through the ‘fsfe’ group on identi.ca but a more frequent official presence would reach non-members and non-subscribers of MLs. Particularly useful if a news item is blogged into context; some of us aren’t as politically adept and may not see why some stories are such a big deal.
• Make personal this stuff that happens. For example: it’s your government, they’re seeing free software as a viable opportunity to take the national IT infrastructure forward. Help them.
• In both public and private sector organisations, if the money-saving aspects are seen as more prominent then try promoting the modular, reusable nature of FS, and particularly open standards for current and future interoperability. The freedom of choice, if you will.
• Reflecting on this meeting in Manchester as I travelled home to Chester showed how distributed UK fellows are. Physical presence at meetings is difficult, if not impossible, for some and this shows when encouraging fellows for real-world, proactive efforts. Maybe our future meetings could make use of some live digital communications, such as IRC, to take comments from those outside the M60? MaDLab’s wi-fi chould handle that, no?

Many thanks to those attendees and Sam for organising the meet, and of course MadLab. Also my CAMRA-backed thanks to Marble Beers for selling their wares there, appreciated after a long day! Lastly thanks to you for reading; your responses are welcome over at my new fsfe blog, on which I will import / have imported older posts on similar topics from my personal blog.