Thoughts about tech, politics, and more
(Tag: report)

System Hackers meeting - Lyon edition

For the 4th time, and less than 5 months after the last meeting, the FSFE System Hackers met in person to coordinate their activities, work on complex issues, and exchange know-how. This time, we chose yet another town familiar to one of our team members as venue – Lyon in France. What follows is a report of this gathering that happened shortly before #stayhome became the order of the day.

The 3rd FSFE System Hackers hackathon

On 10 and 11 October, the FSFE System Hackers met in person to tackle problems and new features regarding the servers and services the FSFE is running. The team consists of dedicated volunteers who ensure that the community and staff can work effectively. The recent meeting built on the great work of the past 2 years which have been shaped by large personal and technical changes.

The System Hackers are responsible for the maintenance and development of a large number of services. From the fsfe.org website’s deployment to the mail servers and blogs, from Git to internal services like DNS and monitoring, all these services, virtual machines and physical servers are handled by this friendly group that is always looking forward to welcoming new members.

FSFE Planet has been refurbished

If you are reading these lines, you are already accessing the brand-new planet of the FSFE. While Björn, Coordinator of Team Germany, has largely improved the design in late 2017, we tackled many underlying issues this time.

So what has changed under the hood?

  • The whole system runs in a Docker container now, with all code accessible on our Git. Yes, Docker has drawbacks, but in this case it eases maintenance for our volunteers and makes contributions to design and code very simple.
  • The old planet ran on a very old Debian server which had issues with modern TLS versions. This basically erased a few blogs from the planet whose webservers do not support older encryption standards.
  • The design has been improved once more. It now more closely aligns to the design of our main page fsfe.org and feels more natively to use and browse.
  • Many blogs which were not accessible any more have been removed, and those which redirected to other URLs have been updated accordingly.

So with the migration to the new system you will probably find a few new blogs and unread posts in your RSS feeds now. So please do not be confused about it but look forward to even more useful and interesting bits from the FSFE community!

OpenRheinRuhr 2016 – A report of iron and freedom

Last weekend, I visited Oberhausen to participate in OpenRheinRuhr, a well-known Free Software event in north-western Germany. Over two days I was part of FSFE’s booth team, gave a talk, and enjoyed talking to tons of like-minded people about politics, technology and other stuff. In the next few minutes you will learn what coat hangers have to do with flat irons and which hotel you shouldn’t book if you plan to visit Oberhausen.

FrOSCon 2016 – Ein Rückblick

For English readers: This is a short report about the last FrOSCon conference with some pictures and the talk recordings. Have a look at Polina’s talk (second video), it’s in English!

Letztes Wochenende, am 20. und 21. August, fand in Sankt Augustin bei Bonn die 11. Ausgabe der FrOSCon statt, einer Konferenz zu Freier Software. Auch dieses Jahr war die FSFE mit einem Stand vertreten, an dem wir viele interessante Gespräche geführt und einen Ausschnitt unserer aktuellsten T-Shirts und weiterer Artikel präsentiert haben.

My internship at FSFE

I recently saw that the Free Software Foundation Europe is offering a new and very interesting internship position. That’s a great opportunity for every student interested in Free Software and political activism — and for me to write about my internship I completed from October 2013 until end of March 2014. Here’s a report I wrote some time ago:

Starting from October 2013 I was able to work 6 months as an intern for the Free Software Foundation Europe in Berlin. This was an internship required by my bachelor degree course at the University of Konstanz (Germany) where I study Politics and Public Administration. Some years before my internship I already was an FSFE Fellow and then decided to apply there.