FSFE supporters Vienna

To celebrate the 25^th anniversary of the Veganmania summer festivals this year a third instance of the festival took place between October 6^th and 8^th. It was the biggest ever. And once more volunteers of the local FSFE supporters manned an information stall about free software and the relevance of independence on our computing devices.

It is somewhat odd that over the years it has became somewhat daunting to describe the tested ingredients for a very successful information desk again and again. But we once more could use this opportunity to talk to many interested passers by and to tell them about the advantages free software grants its users and how important this is in a society that increasingly interacts using electronic devices. Therefore, it shouldn’t still surprise how well the comparably big and thick Public Money, Public Code brochures are received. I would never have guessed that such a large and rather technical take away would find so many people appreciating it enough to carry it around with them for hours. The newest delivery of materials ordered for this event were exhausted before the street festival concluded. Even if I have long switched to making specifically large orders because the usual information desk packages the FSFE office suggests wouldn’t even last for two hours on the events we take part in. Luckily we could at least re-stock our most important orange leaflet listing ten of the most widely used GNU distributions combined with a few words explaining the differences mid-way through the event because a print shop had open on the weekend and we could print it out early in the morning before people showed up for the street festival.

Despite taking place in Autumn the weather was mostly very mild. Unfortunately, on the last day rain still caught up with us by slowly growing stronger from a very light spree to proper rain. Therefore, it was hard to decide when we should actually pack-up our information material in order to protect it from getting destroyed by the rain. Especially because the people on the festival didn’t seem to mind and carried on visiting our desk. But at some point stapling the leaflets under our umbrella wasn’t good enough any longer and we needed to remove the top soaked through materials and finally pack-up. So we quit an hour early but probably didn’t sacrifice very much potential. At least this way we ourselves had the chance to actually grab some delicious food from the plentiful offerings at the Veganmania.

Our posters have become rather worn out over the years and don’t look very well any longer. We need to replace them. Probably made out of more resilient material than paper. Then the constant putting them up with sellotape and removing it after our information desks are done shouldn’t have an irreversible effect on them any longer.

But the end of the event wasn’t all that came from: This time a manager of a volunteer-led local museum was quick to follow-up on our recommendation to not throw away older laptops that couldn’t run the pre-installed proprietary operating system any longer. And it wouldn’t be a good idea either because there wouldn’t be any further security updates either. So, a few days after the event we installed GNU systems with a lightweight desktop on four laptops and she also asked for a talk in the museum where we could explain the value of free software. And she even suggested that she could make a lottery among the attendees to win two of the revived devices. It is planned to happen at some point next year. We are looking forward to that.