FSF announces annual meeting March 21-22: The LibrePlanet 2009 conference
Boston, Massachusetts, USA--Thursday, February 5, 2009--The Free Software Foundation has announced LibrePlanet 2009, an expansion of its traditional annual meeting to a two-day event. The event will be held in Cambridge, MA, on March 21st and March 22nd, 2009, and in addition to presentations from FSF staff and board members will include a full "unconference" day of work oriented toward progressing free network services and other areas important to the free software community as outlined on the FSF's High Priority Projects list.
Alongside last year's meeting, the FSF helped launch the autonomo.us working group, convened as an independent advisory group of programmers and activists concerned about the effects of network services on user freedom. Continuing on that path, several autonomo.us members will be in attendance at this year's event to help lead talks and participate in working groups, including Evan Prodromou of identi.ca, FSF board members Benjamin Mako Hill and Henri Poole, the Software Freedom Conservancy's Bradley Kuhn, and Creative Commons's Mike Linksvayer.
FSF's operations manager John Sullivan said, "It's exciting that now, in our seventh year of hosting this event, we're able to expand it to two days and add an 'unconference' style segment bringing together community members to focus on making tangible progress in these critical areas. We intend this as a working conference, but participation is not limited to coders; we'll also need folks who can do visual design, write and edit text, and share their experiences as free software users."
There will be three tracks at the conference: Free Network Services, High Priority Projects and LibrePlanet Activism Network, and attendance to the entire conference is free to FSF associate members, with nonmembers who are committed to the ideals of software freedom paying a $60 fee to cover conference costs. Space is limited, so the FSF is requesting RSVPs to membership@fsf.org by March 2. Further details and the conference wiki can be found at http://www.fsf.org/associate/meetings/2009. The list of High Priority Projects is at http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority.html.
About the FSF
The Free Software Foundation, founded in 1985, is dedicated to promoting computer users' right to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute computer programs. The FSF promotes the development and use of free (as in freedom) software -- particularly the GNU operating system and its GNU/Linux variants -- and free documentation for free software. The FSF also helps to spread awareness of the ethical and political issues of freedom in the use of software, and its Web sites, located at fsf.org and gnu.org, are an important source of information about GNU/Linux. Donations to support the FSF's work can be made at http://donate.fsf.org. Its headquarters are in Boston, MA, USA.
Media Contacts
John Sullivan
Operations Manager
Free Software Foundation
(617)542-5942
campaigns@fsf.org