FSFE supporters Vienna

This year’s vegan summer festival in Vienna once more was bigger than ever before. It not only lasted four days but it doubled in size also. Last year 35 exhibitors where present. From Wednesday 3rd to Saturday 6th of June 2015 no less than 70 organisations and companies had set up their stalls in front of the Museumsquartier (MQ), opposite the famous museums of art history and natural history.

But not only the festival itself has got bigger, our already tratitional information stand was also larger. We were given more space and could therefore offer about four meters of tightly packed information material for a total of 50 hours (excluding breaks). Unfortunately, beside me, only Gregor was available from our Fellows to man the stall. He came on Wednesday and Thursday. Luckily this didn’t cause serious problems since we encountered unexpected help from other people later on.

Martin has been using Free Software for quite a while and visited our stalls on different occasions over the years. So I knew that he is very knowledgable about the issues we usually speak to people about. When I asked him for help he instantly shifted his time table and jumped in when I needed to rush into the Radio Orange studio for a live show about the festival itself. Not all people feel comfortable doing the technical side of live radio shows. Even if they are very easy, which is true in this case.

Radio Orange is an interesting subject in its own right. Austria was quite late with liberating the radio licenses. One of the first free radios was Radio Orange (o94) and it is set up completely with Free Software. I am constantly amazed how well this is done. Hundreds of very different people are using its setup on a regular basis. Some are more frequent than others. Some are very computer savy. Others avoid computers altogether. But the obviously very skilled technicans, who built and administrate the radio’s setup, manage to give all these very different people a good experience. I’ve been helping with two shows for quite a time now and everything runs 24/7. People doing their own shows, just enter the live studio, and start talking at the right time. It’s as easy as that. Pre-recorded shows are done similarly effortlessly. It’s possible to upload shows beforehand and they get aired at the right time automatically. Heck, there is even an automatic replacement if someone doesn’t show up or forgot to upload anything. I don’t know any other example of a complicated system with such a wide range of user types running this smoothly. Of course I have encountered glitches from time to time, but they where small and dealt with fast. This is an impressive example how powerful and reliable Free Software can be.

Back to the festival: Martin did a great job manning the stall while I was away for the radio show. When I was back he even stayed longer to support the stall. Many friends of mine visited me on the stall, but there wasn’t much chance to talk to me. I was involved in interesting, engaging conversations about Free Software with normal visitors of our stall virtullay the whole time. So often my friends didn’t even get the chance to talk to me and went away after a while of waiting for me to become available again. Even when more than one person was manning our information desk sometimes people didn’t get the chance to talk to us because there was more demand than we could meet.

On Friday René from Frankfurt, Germany showed up. Originally he had just made the journey to visit the Veganmania festival. He had his luggage with him and got stuck at our desk. In the beginning he just was a normal visitor but after a while he stepped in because there where so many people who wanted to ask questions and he obviously could answer them. In the end he helped with manning our desk until Saturday night. Happy with his competent help, I invited him to stay at my place and we had a great time discussing Free Software ideas until late in the night. So we didn’t get much sleep because we set up the stall about 9:30am each day and stayed there until 10pm. Unfortunately, we got on so well that he missed his train on Sunday. Therefore he had to endure an unpleasant train ride back home without the possibility to sleep.

I appreciate the unexpected help of Martin and René and hope they will stick around. Both ensured me they loved the experience and they want to do it in future again.

As usual, many people got lured to our desk because of the Free Your Android poster. Others just dropped by in order to find out what this all was about since they didn’t expect our subject on a vegan summer festival. But of course it was easy to explain how activism and Free Software relate to each other. In the end we ran out of several leaflets and stickers. In the hot weather we didn’t manage to sell the last of our Fellowship hoodies, but we sold some “there is no cloud …” bags and also received a donation.

The information desk marathon left us with a considerably smaller leaflet stack, brown skin like after two weeks of holidays and many great memories from discussions with very different people. The Veganmania summer festivals in Vienna are clearly worth the effort. We even got explicitly invited to join the vegan summer festival in Graz in September since the organising people figured they wanted to have someone informing about Free Software there also. I guess it is not necessary for us to travel to Graz since I’m told there are dedicated Free Software advocates there too.