Next month, the 6th edition of esLibre congress will occupy Las Naves, in Valencia (Spain), the May 24th and 25th. The event started in Granada, as the former local Free Software Office responsible and university teacher, JJ, pushed the idea into some of the people who were used to organize similar things (including myself). Since then, we've slowly created some traditions, such as celebrating the event in a different city each time, so communities and individuals all around Spain had the opportunity to assist at some point. This added a brand new layer of complexity, that included finding local communities aiming to help us, or understanding the context of each new emplacement to adapt the event to it.
Each year, the organization, as well as the event itself, is different. Yet, we try to keep some common ground: free culture, diversity awareness and recognition to both technical and non-technical skills that keep the free software culture rolling. We had our issues through the peak of the pandemic years, but we are trying to, slowly (and safe) coming back to what it used to be. This year we are humbled to also share our event with KDE España and their Akademy congress, as well as a room for Wikimedia and a DEVROOM for academical free software discussions, among all the talks, workshops and short talks.
As we are escalating, we decided to reserve a short space for a round table on "Organizing a free software event" which is meant for others to have a guide based on how we do it, answering questions and more. I will try to share the key points over here afterwards.
After receiving a great amount of proposals (even more than the last years) we are trying to put it all together and soon we will publish the final schedule. In the meantime, you all can see the proposals themselves, as they are automated to go from the form to a pull request in our repo to assure transparency in the voting and commenting period.
Every year I feel astonished by the amount of people willing to either help, participate or assist, just to talk and discuss free software and their communities. I recently read a really sad header somewhere saying "are free software communities dying?" let me tell you: they are not, since I see it. Even when things seem rough in the tech world, there's someone out there willing to create code for others, just because. Or translating documentation, so it's more accessible. Or thinking of ways the software could look better, more intuitive. I know a lot of people came around to the idea this exist and that's it. I pretty much myself became an actual adult through university having my hand hold by this sort of communities, and ten years later I keep feeling surrounded by it. I should be the one more used to this, but I'm not, I keep feeling grateful and surprised.
Here, look for us in:
Telegram: https://t.me/esLibre
Mastodon: https://floss.social/@eslibre/
Gitlab: https://gitlab.com/eslibre
Twitter: https://twitter.com/esLibre_
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