I've recently attended the FSFE Summit[1], combined with QtCon[2], KDE and VideoLAN project gatherings, in Berlin.
This is the first time FSFE has run a summit and it was organized to co-incide with the 15th anniversary of the organization. The different communities combined their schedules in a single program which is available on the QtCon website[3]. Only a small number of organizations had booths at the event, mainly sponsors seeking to recruit people. I inquired a few weeks ago if it would be possible for community organizations like Debian to have tables and they weren't able to accommodate that in this first instance of the summit. As some people may already know, FSFE is not fundamentally a development-focused organization, they focus[4] on advocacy, policy and social issues relating to free software. The people at the event and the range of talks reflected this focus. In fact, there was an extraordinarily diverse range of talks and by far the biggest problem people encountered at the FSFE summit was choosing which talks to attend because many interesting talks were always happening at the same time. Looking at the diversity of the talks, they included hands-on advice about free software for businesses, feedback about experiences people have had promoting free software in the non-profit sector, discussions about FSFE infrastructure issues, updates on policy challenges coming from the European legislators, lightning talks and a wide range of technical talks from the other communities present at the event. One talk I'd like to mention in particular: Marta RybczyĆska gave a talk about how to give a talk presenting your favorite project[5], I would encourage anybody who hasn't given a talk before to watch her video and consider having a go at a Mini DebConf[6] (Cambridge is very soon now) or another event. On the first night of the event people from all the different communities dined together in the venue and then had a social evening with fussball, darts and slot cars. On the second night the FSFE community went to the c-base[7] hackerspace, for a party celebrating FSFE's 15th birthday. 15 years have disappeared quickly, but nothing disappeared faster than the pizzas. Personally, I gave a lightning talk about the Postbooks Qt-based accounting/ERP software[8] and a talk about strategies for increasing the success of Free Communications[9] with Free Software. It is not yet confirmed when the event will be run again or what form it might take, I personally feel it is a particularly valuable opportunity, especially for European members of the Debian community and I would hope to go again. Regards, Daniel 1. https://fsfe.org/community/events/2016/summit/frontpage.en.html 2. https://qtcon.org/ 3. https://conf.qtcon.org/en/qtcon/public/schedule 4. https://fsfe.org/work.en.html 5. http://www-ftp.lip6.fr/pub/X11/kde-applicationdata/akademy/2016/338_why_and_how_to_present_your_project.mp4 6. https://wiki.debian.org/MiniDebConf 7. https://www.c-base.org 8. http://ftp5.gwdg.de/pub/linux/kde/extrafiles/akademy/2016/585_lightning_talk.mp4 9. https://conf.qtcon.org/en/qtcon/public/events/448