This is certainly the question I received most often when people learned I was not going to be available again for election as president of the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE).
Being founder and president of FSFE has been a challenge in more than one way, and I have enjoyed it greatly. It would certainly have been possible to stay in this position for longer. But the time was right for a change, and as explained in my other posting, I believe this change was the best possible choice for the organisation. So it became clear that it was time to start looking for the next big challenge.
Naturally I began thinking about this for the past year that I knew the change was going to happen at this year’s General Assembly. Some time was spent talking to friends, some time on identifying opportunities, and even more time was spent on weeding out less interesting options. This process has narrowed down my choices to a group of four or five, between which the choice is likely to be made.
These discussions are still ongoing, so nothing I can talk about right now.
Meanwhile I will take some well-deserved vacation with my wife and do some consulting work. If you would like to work together, you can find my profile on FSFE’s page, which also contains a more verbose CV in PDF format.
Once the decision for my next big challenge has been made, I’ll let you know.
My sincere thanks to everyone I had the pleasure to encounter and get to know over the years.
A special notice goes to Bernhard, Matthias, and all the others who surprised me during the assembly with the good wishes from so many people I had the pleasure to work with more closely during my time as president of the Free Software Foundation Europe. I also guess that having the General Assembly and its guests sing “Oh, Freedom” was better than the alternative.
Thank you, all.
