freie.it at conference on 21st of February
Saturday, February 28th, 2015
freie.it is a web platform founded by some members of the Viennese Fellowship group of the FSFE. It aims to help people who are interested in using free software but who do not want to administrate their own computers. At least in Austria all support offers for free software users are aimed at businesses. Therefore only techically interested private people could start using free software in the past if they didn’t happen know others well aquainted with free software willing to help them. To close this gap free.it offers a simple search field to type in buzz words. After submitting the form a list of people knowledgeable with this subjects on free software systems is displayed. People searching for help then can browse through this results and can contact the persons they want to consult. The platform is merely a way to connect people. So all terms can be defined by the people interacting with each other. Some people offer help on a voluntary basis. Others will help for a fee. The only condition for experts offering their services on the platform is the preference of free software.
The team of freie.it invites free software experts to create a profile. After applying to be listed the team reviews the profile and releases the experts to be listed on the platform. At the moment freie.it is in it’s trial phase and does offer services in Vienna only. If everything works out as intended the local restriction can be left behind. Even others can get the freely licenced python code on bitbucket and offer similar services independently.
On 21st of February freie.it was invited to participate as one of 50 initiatives on a conference about wellbeing for all (Gutes Leben für alle). The project was explicitly invited because we applied in a contest a few months ago. The contest aimed to choose the best ideas for sustainable and fair development in our society. freie.it didn’t win anything back then, but the organizers of the conference still wanted us to participate at the conferences fair of initiatives.
Originally the organizers aimed to welcome about 250 people at the recently build new campus of the Viennese universitiy for economics. But in a very short period of time everything was overbooked and in the end about 850 registrations exceeded all expectations. A young assistent from the university told me about a little group of alternative thinkers at the university responsible for such events. Normally nobody would expect the university of economics to host such an event. But some people obviously could move something even in this traditionally not very progressive environment.
The fair of initiatives covered a lot of different subjects. The majority was about better ways to use and share our ressources. There was a focus on local initiatives for connecting people with different ressources and/or skills. Over all freie.it was received very well. The audience was open in a very similar way than the visitors of the Veganmania summer festivals we attended in the last years with a boot of the Viennese Fellowship group of the FSFE. They where open to consider free software as an alternative and did quickly understand the problems with closed standards and proprietary software production. One difference to the people met on the Veganmania summer festivals was the big user base of Apple computers. I think I never met a target group with more individuals using Apple products. I would guess at least eighty percent of the many people I talked to at the event told me to use OSX from Apple.
We set up our very little boot as one of the first initiatives at about 10 am. Even if we had more leaflets, folders and stickers on free software and open standards than any other initiative on other subjects we had only about 60 x 30 centimeters space on a table. It was tightly packed with colorful, inviting material. We could only put our books about free software on display in the late afternoon after some initiatives left and we could use the only then spare space on the table. We where quite buzy the whole day with many interested people and shortly after 9pm we packed everything together and left the venue because it got closed up.
Even if we could not reach tousands of people (like on events such as the Game City fair) I still think it was very well worth taking the time since the quality of our conversations was very high and we still could introduce many people to the virtues of free software.