I tried to outline some plans for the organisation of a Free Software workshop later this year. They're attached to this email. In short, it boils down to that we would need about 13 000 SEK to carry it out in this form. We could cut some corners, bringing people who are already in Gothenburg in to hold parts of the workshop, for instance, but this would come with a quality cut as well, obviously.
Hi All,
Firstly, thank you Jonas for putting together such a comprehensive workshop! I have some questions just so I can get a better perspective of our goals here.....
1. What is our target audience? The reason I ask is that if the location is a University we might run the risk of making it look "academic". If we are interested in Business then maybe a hotel is a better option or a conference centre. I know the price is more, but I would just like to get an idea of who we would want the audience to compose of.
2. Gothenburg versus Stockholm?? If we want Government, industry and press then....ehm...is it better to bring you all to Stockholm?
3. What do we want to achieve by doing this? Press activity? business take up of FS, Government awareness?..
4. How big would we like the audience to be?
5. Money? Are we looking for donors for the day or paying delegates?
Tom
Jonas Oberg wrote:
I tried to outline some plans for the organisation of a Free Software workshop later this year. They're attached to this email. In short, it boils down to that we would need about 13 000 SEK to carry it out in this form. We could cut some corners, bringing people who are already in Gothenburg in to hold parts of the workshop, for instance, but this would come with a quality cut as well, obviously.
##
Title: Free Software Workshop Author: Jonas Oberg,,, Abstract: This is an outline for a possible workshop on Free Software to be arranged by the Free Software Foundation Europe in Gothenburg sometime during the fourth quarter of 2005. The workshop would be held during one day, starting at 10.00 and ending sometime in the afternoon. This will allow participants from Stockholm to arrive comfortably with the first train from there. Hopefully, the workshop can be arranged in collaboration with either the Department of informatics and/or the IT University, and/or Chalmers Computer Science department.
1 SPEAKERS
This is a list of speakers that can be considered for the workshop. The aim is to have six to eight speakers during the workshop. None of the speakers listed here has as of yet been asked to participate, so they only represent some thoughts of what could possibly be arranged. The speakers fall mostly into three cathegories, with the first talking about Free Software and related areas and the second talking about encryption in its various forms. The idea is to use the time before lunch to talk about Free Software and why it's important, and then the afternoon with encryption (which is getting increasingly important to preserve peoples integrity). The day would end with a discussion panel on Free Software.
1.1 JONAS ÖBERG
30 minutes: Jonas could talk about the FSF Europe and Free Software in general.
1.2 RICHARD LEVITTE
45 minutes: Richard Levitte has worked extensively with OpenSSL and can talk about X.509 and other interesting things.
1.3 MATHIAS KLANG
30 minutes: Creative Commons
1.4 NIELS MÖLLER
45 minutes: LSH and related technologies
1.5 TOM CALTHROP
45 minutes: Barnraiser and aroundme.
1.6 WERNER KOCH
45 minutes: GnuPG and encryption infrastructure in general.
2 INVITATIONS
Invitations will need to be sent out at least two months in advance. If the plans for the workshop can be finalised sometime during august or september, this would make the workshop take place in november, most likely. Some kind of registration would be good to have to get an idea of the number of participants that will (try) to come.
3 RESOURCES
Arranging a workshop requires some resources, in the form of venue and travel costs for the invited speakers. Nothing needs to be budgeted for accomodation, since speakers from Stockholm can arrive and lleave on the same day, and an invited speaker from another country can always be found place for somewhere.
3.1 VENUE
If the workshop is arranged in collaboration with either of the universities, then the venue can be booked through them. The venue would depend upon the number of people that will attend and availability of venues, but here's some ideas; Konferenscentrum Wallenberg (Lyktan or Wallenbergsalen), Handelshögskolan, IT-Universitetet/Chalmers Lindholmen
3.2 REFRESHMENTS
Some refreshments will be needed in the breaks, but it should be quite enough to have coffee, water and some cookies. With some creativitity, it should be possible to get away with 500-1500 kr for this, depending upon the number of participants.
3.3 TRAVEL
Travel expenses will need to be reserved for the invited speakers from other cities. For those coming from Stockholm, about 2300kr needs to be reserved (normal X2000 travel fee). Of course, it might well be possible to reserve cheaper tickets, but 2300kr is the maximum it could cost, so that is the buffer that needs to be allocated. For invited speakers from other countries in Europe, roughly 3500kr should cover the flight expenditure.
3.4 WEB PAGES
The web pages for the workshop can reside on the FSF Europe web server.
3.4.1 REGISTRATION
Some kind of automated system needs to be created for registration. However, since this is just to keep tabs on how many will participate, it would be enough to have them email some specific address and count the number of mails (sans spam) that arrive.
3.5 LUNCH
Participants can be asked to arrange for lunch themselves, though we might want to invite the speakers for lunch at least. This will be a smaller cost though. However, not having an arranged lunch will put some additional constraints on the venue and it needs to be held where it is easy to find food around.
4 BUDGET
Taking into account three speakers from Stockholm, one from Germany and the cost for refreshments and lunches for the speakers, about 13000 kr would be needed to complete the arrangement successfully. Somewhat less might be needed but this would be what needs to be allocated.
Sweden mailing list Sweden@fsfeurope.org https://mail.fsfeurope.org/mailman/listinfo/sweden
Hi Tom,
- What is our target audience?
I'm going to go ahead and answer a lot of questions at once, if that's okay with you. We have long discussed arranging some sort of workshop or seminar series on Free Software, and the topics and audience has been different most times we've spoken about it.
One of the reasons we've not been able to do it has been lack of resorces, both economic and human resources. So we need to start somewhere, and I think we should work on increasing our human resources.
So the workshop that I outlined is aimed at those who will primarily be interested in working with us, which is the slightly more technical people in society, most of them in the 20-35 year range, either studying or working in the software field.
It would be an opportunity both for them to see what we do, but also for us to get to know them. And it would bring a lot of people much closer to us, where we can actually use them as resources.
Subsequently, we will also want to do more specific conferences, seminars and workshops, aimed at more specific fields, but I think we need to start where we have the highest chance of success and gain some momentum by fighting some easy to win battles before we go for the big fish.
And this would be one of those easy to win battles.
Hi Jonas,
Got it. Thanks for tidying up the loose edges there.
I know it is not a huge donation, but I guess anything helps......I will travel to and speak at the conference for free, so you can remove any costs associated with me from the budget.
How are you thinking of financing this? Are we looking for donors?
Tom
Jonas Oberg wrote:
Hi Tom,
- What is our target audience?
I'm going to go ahead and answer a lot of questions at once, if that's okay with you. We have long discussed arranging some sort of workshop or seminar series on Free Software, and the topics and audience has been different most times we've spoken about it.
One of the reasons we've not been able to do it has been lack of resorces, both economic and human resources. So we need to start somewhere, and I think we should work on increasing our human resources.
So the workshop that I outlined is aimed at those who will primarily be interested in working with us, which is the slightly more technical people in society, most of them in the 20-35 year range, either studying or working in the software field.
It would be an opportunity both for them to see what we do, but also for us to get to know them. And it would bring a lot of people much closer to us, where we can actually use them as resources.
Subsequently, we will also want to do more specific conferences, seminars and workshops, aimed at more specific fields, but I think we need to start where we have the highest chance of success and gain some momentum by fighting some easy to win battles before we go for the big fish.
And this would be one of those easy to win battles.
We need to do such a thing to get more publicity and attract other people to fs.
I am not sure about the audience though. It will be hard to boot-strap ("start up from scratch") this kind of event. I would like to make a workshop for an audience concisting of politicians etc. But I guess this will hard to attract the attention of these people so perhaps the best thing will be to gain more focus among our alikes :)
What I try to do (or rather tried since I am far to busy at the moment writing drivers for some nast machine) is (re)establish contacts with the IT stratety groups within the government. I will try to get in touch with Patrik Fältström (Cisco and IT strategy Group).
Perhaps the best thing to do is to talk about this over phone.... which brings p the question about a nice program for phone over Ip. Is there any such? .... with a nice license ;)
About werner, Economically it will not be so good bringing Werner here but on the other hand I think that some 90% of people using FS know of either gpg or werner (wk). So apart from being a very nice person I think that Werner's presence will mean a lot which will be well worth the invested money.
/h
.... btw, I think I managed to say almost nothing in this email.
On Sat, 2005-07-09 at 06:46 +0200, Jonas Oberg wrote:
I tried to outline some plans for the organisation of a Free Software workshop later this year. They're attached to this email. In short, it boils down to that we would need about 13 000 SEK to carry it out in this form. We could cut some corners, bringing people who are already in Gothenburg in to hold parts of the workshop, for instance, but this would come with a quality cut as well, obviously.
plain text document attachment (main.txt) ##
Title: Free Software Workshop Author: Jonas Oberg,,, Abstract: This is an outline for a possible workshop on Free Software to be arranged by the Free Software Foundation Europe in Gothenburg sometime during the fourth quarter of 2005. The workshop would be held during one day, starting at 10.00 and ending sometime in the afternoon. This will allow participants from Stockholm to arrive comfortably with the first train from there. Hopefully, the workshop can be arranged in collaboration with either the Department of informatics and/or the IT University, and/or Chalmers Computer Science department.
1 SPEAKERS
This is a list of speakers that can be considered for the workshop. The aim is to have six to eight speakers during the workshop. None of the speakers listed here has as of yet been asked to participate, so they only represent some thoughts of what could possibly be arranged. The speakers fall mostly into three cathegories, with the first talking about Free Software and related areas and the second talking about encryption in its various forms. The idea is to use the time before lunch to talk about Free Software and why it's important, and then the afternoon with encryption (which is getting increasingly important to preserve peoples integrity). The day would end with a discussion panel on Free Software.
1.1 JONAS ÖBERG
30 minutes: Jonas could talk about the FSF Europe and Free Software in general.
1.2 RICHARD LEVITTE
45 minutes: Richard Levitte has worked extensively with OpenSSL and can talk about X.509 and other interesting things.
1.3 MATHIAS KLANG
30 minutes: Creative Commons
1.4 NIELS MÖLLER
45 minutes: LSH and related technologies
1.5 TOM CALTHROP
45 minutes: Barnraiser and aroundme.
1.6 WERNER KOCH
45 minutes: GnuPG and encryption infrastructure in general.
2 INVITATIONS
Invitations will need to be sent out at least two months in advance. If the plans for the workshop can be finalised sometime during august or september, this would make the workshop take place in november, most likely. Some kind of registration would be good to have to get an idea of the number of participants that will (try) to come.
3 RESOURCES
Arranging a workshop requires some resources, in the form of venue and travel costs for the invited speakers. Nothing needs to be budgeted for accomodation, since speakers from Stockholm can arrive and lleave on the same day, and an invited speaker from another country can always be found place for somewhere.
3.1 VENUE
If the workshop is arranged in collaboration with either of the universities, then the venue can be booked through them. The venue would depend upon the number of people that will attend and availability of venues, but here's some ideas; Konferenscentrum Wallenberg (Lyktan or Wallenbergsalen), Handelshögskolan, IT-Universitetet/Chalmers Lindholmen
3.2 REFRESHMENTS
Some refreshments will be needed in the breaks, but it should be quite enough to have coffee, water and some cookies. With some creativitity, it should be possible to get away with 500-1500 kr for this, depending upon the number of participants.
3.3 TRAVEL
Travel expenses will need to be reserved for the invited speakers from other cities. For those coming from Stockholm, about 2300kr needs to be reserved (normal X2000 travel fee). Of course, it might well be possible to reserve cheaper tickets, but 2300kr is the maximum it could cost, so that is the buffer that needs to be allocated. For invited speakers from other countries in Europe, roughly 3500kr should cover the flight expenditure.
3.4 WEB PAGES
The web pages for the workshop can reside on the FSF Europe web server.
3.4.1 REGISTRATION
Some kind of automated system needs to be created for registration. However, since this is just to keep tabs on how many will participate, it would be enough to have them email some specific address and count the number of mails (sans spam) that arrive.
3.5 LUNCH
Participants can be asked to arrange for lunch themselves, though we might want to invite the speakers for lunch at least. This will be a smaller cost though. However, not having an arranged lunch will put some additional constraints on the venue and it needs to be held where it is easy to find food around.
4 BUDGET
Taking into account three speakers from Stockholm, one from Germany and the cost for refreshments and lunches for the speakers, about 13000 kr would be needed to complete the arrangement successfully. Somewhat less might be needed but this would be what needs to be allocated.
Sweden mailing list Sweden@fsfeurope.org https://mail.fsfeurope.org/mailman/listinfo/sweden
Henrik Sandklef wrote:
I am not sure about the audience though. It will be hard to boot-strap ("start up from scratch") this kind of event. I would like to make a workshop for an audience concisting of politicians etc. But I guess this will hard to attract the attention of these people so perhaps the best thing will be to gain more focus among our alikes :)
Yes, my reasoning is something like this; if such an event would make us able to find, say, 4 people, who would be willing to do some amount of work for us (which is not unthinkable, since we already are thinking about some of them), that would increase our work capacity by almost 100%.
Having a workshop for politicians is a good idea generally, but none of them would be very interested in working for us. Or at least not in the capacity that we want them to :-)
What I try to do (or rather tried since I am far to busy at the moment writing drivers for some nast machine) is (re)establish contacts with the IT stratety groups within the government. I will try to get in touch with Patrik Fältström (Cisco and IT strategy Group).
This might be useful, but wasn't a lot of their work completed now that the IT proposition has been tabled? They will probably have a lot of work even after this, I'm sure, but it would be good to find out exactly what they're working with and when.
Perhaps the best thing to do is to talk about this over phone.... which brings p the question about a nice program for phone over Ip. Is there any such? .... with a nice license ;)
Yes, there are several actually. For softphones, most seem to prefer LinPhone. As for real VoIP phones, I'm now using one called AT-320 which is based around the PA168 chipset. There are several other (cheap) phones based on the same chipset, and the nice thing about it is that Aredfox, that develops the chipset, have recently begun releasing their firmware with a BSD license.