Julipan: Pressing Words

During a few days in April I spent 24 hours on a train in order to attend a Fellowship meeting in Berlin. A large part of the motivation was to meet some of the people I’m working with on a regular basis, in particular Hannes and Henner who have been coordinating the PDFreaders.org campaign. Of course, I also got to revisit a city of which I have several good memories, and was able to sample a decent selection of unfamiliar Berliner beer.

The train ride was actually very enjoyable, even though I had to get up around half past the middle of the night. At first, I was so tired that I couldn’t really focus on work, so I spent the first few hours staring at the Swedish morning fog drifting through the sunrise while listening intensely to Banco’s masterpiece “Darwin!” on my trusted Vorbis-player. That felt a bit magical.

By the time we got to Copenhagen, I was finally starting to wake up, and was glad to see that Copenhagen still is very much Copenhagen. Danish people everywhere, wine bottles at the news-stand, and fumes of fatty foods filling the enormous hall of the central station. The Danes have apparently adopted similar non-smoking laws to what we have in Sweden, but, interestingly, they seem to have trouble getting the message across. All around the station hung giant signs, pleading its visitors not to smoke inside. Having gotten used to the Swedish acceptance policy, I went outside without complaining to satisfy my dependencies, before grabbing a Shawarma roll and locating my platform.

Kapitalismus zerstört

The one part of the journey that I didn’t really care much for was the ferry. Not being very fond of boats in the first place, being in one that behaves like a concentrated shopping mall during spring sale is not my idea of a nice trip. They only sell overpriced crap anyway, but since it’s tax-free people seem to actually buy it. I settled on a cup of overpriced crappy coffee, but it was so bad that I couldn’t even finish it.

Arriving in Hamburg wasn’t particularly pleasant either, as I only had 15 minutes to change trains and had major difficulties finding a sign that could point me to the correct platform. When I finally did find it, I was in good company, as hordes of Germans were initiating their holiday on the very same train. It took me another 15 minutes to move from the entrance of the cart to my seat at the back. By that time, summer had arrived upon my person, and I was finally able to remove the outer, woolly, level of my clothing.

Arriving in Berlin was a very peculiar experience, and not at all as I remembered it. Of course, this has quite a lot to do with the new mega-station they have built, but also with the vast empty spaces around it. It was almost like arriving at an airport in the outskirts of a futuristic metropolis, some 50 years after the apocalypse. Fortunately, Matthias picked me up at the station and took me for a stroll towards civilisation. By the time we had reached the Reichstag I started to recognise my surroundings. After some walking, tramming, and some more walking, we rapidly approached the legendary NewThinkingStore where the meeting was to take place.

While the NewThinkingStore has changed a bit from its original conception, it has served as an inspiration for our own GNU Store project here in Gothenburg. With white walls surrounding an open and inviting space, and a touch of small subversive elements, like the ironic surveillance stickers above the bathroom sink, I felt quite at home there. It also featured the Four Freedoms written on a glass wall, and provided an excellent meeting place for the occasion.

The meeting itself impressed me. Though I was later told that it was relatively unfocussed and unproductive, my experience was the complete opposite, one of astounding productiveness, and I’d really like to see how the Berlin Fellowship group works when they have one of their more productive days. The discussions were really interesting, and delved into politics, feminism, friend-advocacy, education and, of course, preparations for the Linuxtag. As my German is a bit rusty, I’m a bit unsure what the actual conclusions were, but that information should be available on the Berlin group’s mailing list anyway. After the discussions, we formed small working groups. While some started developing a Messenspiel for Linuxtag, others, myself included, had a brainstorming sessions for slogans and posters. We had some great ideas, the best of which have been posted to the mailing list and eventually might show up in the Wiki.

After the meeting, we went to a small Indian restaurant that I really enjoyed. Matthias warned me that it might not be the best or cheapest restaurant, but since it is close nearby, open to 01:00 and usually has place enough for all the Fellows, they tended to migrate there after the meeting had completed. The selection of vegetarian dishes was excellent, and made the question of whether to meat or not to meat a non-issue for me. I even found a dish that combined my favourite fruit with my favourite vegetable. Having been raised on Norwegian “food”, I’d probably be happy with anything Berlin had to offer, and can’t begin to describe the pleasure of enjoying a “Mango und Broccoli in Curry” with a dark Weißbier after a long day of travelling.

Barbecue in Tiergarten

I spent the next day strolling around in Berlin with a friend, trying to avoid the most obvious tourist places but eventually ending up there anyway. In the evening, we had a lovely vegetarian barbecue in the Tiergarten, with lively discussions, excellent food and a wide selection of local beer. The night was unfortunately all to short, as was the part of it which we had dedicated to sleeping. Not exactly in a good shape in the morning, I still managed to find my train with the help of Henner and Nicole, and started the journey home.

The train ride back was much less hectic than the trip to Berlin, something that probably was related to my choice of travelling on a Saturday in the middle of a holiday. The trip went fairly smooth all the way and, apart from the annoying ferry, was truly pleasant as well. I was able to do a lot of interesting work, and spent a lot of time reading through the excellent article submissions we received for the FSCONS book.

Obviously, I will have to revisit Berlin some time in the near future to visit old and new-found friends, preferably together with my wife, Gunhild. It looks like we will have a chance to do so already at Linuxtag, and we might even combine it with the Berlin concert of our favourite Norwegian band, Tuna Laguna, that takes place a few days before. We’ll hopefully be seeing you then.

After eight months of hard work, the Free Society Conference and Nordic Summit of 2008 has come to an end. With around 250 visitors, the conference attendance slightly exceeded our expectations, and it was a truly thrilling experience to be part of it.

Already in the preparation stages of FSCONS it became clear that we had something good and unique going. With the aim of making it a social event that bridges between the different movements working for digital freedom, we tried to construct a multifaceted but unified program that in large part emphasized the social aspects. In addition to the many wonderful speakers, this years conference included a great variety of social activities like workshops, codesprints, a music performance, copyright discussions and, of course, Free Beer. Most of the speakers we invited expressed a great interest in the event, even before it had started, and we had no problems recruiting a sufficient number of volunteers to help us make FSCONS happen.

Our initial decision to divide the speeches and workshops into eight different rooms had its advantages, but also made it very difficult to record every presentation. We did however manage to stream many of them live, and thanks to the hard work of the giss.tv crew, all the videos from FSCONS are already available at http://giss.tv/dmmdb/fscons. In addition to videos, we have published the slides from many of our speakers at http://fscons.org/slides and you can find links to all the films that were screened during the conference at http://fscons.org/film-program

Although the planning started as early as February, there were of course many things that didn’t fall into place until right before the conference. Some of our ideas, like having a Creative Commons Concert in the evening, even had to be discarded, seeing that it was rather impossible to find a suitable concert venue in Gothenburg less than six months in advance. Having a very limited budget was probably our biggest concern though. With few initial sponsors and no idea how many visitors would come, we were unable to tell the speakers that they would have their travel costs covered, and every estimate involving money, like the amount of food and t-shirts, felt risky to say the least. Fortunately though, the conference turned out to be a success in the end, and we even ended up with a small surplus that will help us make the next FSCONS even better.

Many things need to be improved for next year, but all in all it went very well, and the response we received was overwhelmingly positive. We have already started preparations for next year’s event and invite everyone to join the planning process by subscribing to our mailing list at http://mail.fscons.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss. If you only want the major updates, we have a list for that too, at http://mail.fscons.org/mailman/listinfo/announce.

I’m very happy to have been involved in such a wonderful event and hope to see you all at the next FSCONS.

Let’s see