Molly de Blanc

Accepted Talks:

That's a free software issue!

With the saturation of technology in our lives, free software has become more important than ever. You can find computers in the walls of your home and woven through the walls of your heart. With the advent of electronic voting, and the possibility of an all-online census, questions of software safety and user freedom are now touching parts of our lives we may not have thought about before. If you’ve ever wondered to yourself whether something is a free software issue, the answer is probably yes.

Join cyborg lawyer and Software Freedom Conservancy executive director Karen Sandler and free software activist and Free Software Foundation campaigns manager, Molly de Blanc to discuss the wide range of what is a free software issue and why it’s important to view our technology issues through that lens. Together, we’ll discuss how to talk about free software from different perspectives, drawing the connection between issues of software and user freedom to issues ranging from institutional racism to avocado toast. Bring your questions and the topics you want to connect to free software.

The Free Software Foundation, Debian, and the free software movement

Debian and the Free Software Foundation, along with its GNU Project, share many goals and ideals. They are two of the most mature and dedicated organizations working in the free software movement. This is a great opportunity to talk in person about how they can better work together and inspire each other.

FSF members (and potential members) will meet to talk about the FSF’s work, the FSF’s relationship with Debian, and progress of the movement as a whole:

  • A very brief update by the FSF’s executive director and campaigns manager on highlights of the FSF’s work since the last DebConf

  • Feedback (positive and negative) from members, and a little brainstorming about what the FSF should and shouldn’t be doing

  • A review of the current relationship between the FSF and Debian

  • A discussion of areas for collaboration, focused on projects that could be completed or significantly advanced before the next DebConf

Recognizing that we can’t cover everything in 45 minutes, at the beginning, we’ll choose some specific topics to focus on under this general Debian logo umbrella.

Past sessions at DebConf have led to concrete positive results like collaboration on the hardware database at https://h-node.org/. Let’s have another productive one!