[Fsfe-ie] visiting Ireland, local groups and meetings?

[user]

Hi Daniel,

I'm not an active member of the Irish branch, in fact I've never been to
a meeting. This is because travel to Dublin is rare for me. I live in
Co.Tipperary and Limerick is my nearest big town. I live on a low income
and engage in many time-consuming rural, online and other activities
which means I'm always short of time as well as money. 

I imagine most members are in IT in a professional capacity one way or
another and I am an exception to this. But I currently do all of my
computing using Trisquel on my Ministry of Freedom laptop. I've used
gNewSense but when the laptop running that was stolen I replaced it with
this one which came with Trisquel pre-installed and I couldn't find a
good enough reason to go back to gNewSense. I guess I've been using
GNU/Linux around 5 years but other Linux maybe 10years. I run several
websites (unpaid) including for the County Limerick Beekeepers'
Association and have always resisted suggestions to link to Facebook via
their scheme even though we do have a Facebook page run by another
member and I guess they find my attitude quite irritating.

My main concerns are as follows: 

The factors ultimately limiting our independence which with my naive(?)
eyes I see as the control over hardware that the cartel of manufacturers
exercise and the similar control exercised in their field by the ISPs.

I am also quite confused about a number of issues concerning the where
the line is crossed in becoming complicit in the empire-building of the
software giants and find myself using-up valuable time questioning
whether or not I should do this or do that according to what's best for
software-freedom while bearing in mind that there are other issues which
are likely even more important.

Anyway, that's the position with me.

I don't know if there are other members in my area. It would be nice to
think there is a group based at UL perhaps? It's been a while since I
tried to check that out.

Regards,

Keith 





On Wed, 2017-05-10 at 18:25 +0200, Daniel Pocock wrote:
> Hi everybody,
> 
> I'm visiting Ireland from time to time and would be interested in
> getting to know other local members of the fellowship and Ireland's free
> software community in general.
> 
> I've also been visiting Berlin this week and had some discussions with
> the FSFE team and as the new fellowship representative, I'm keen to be
> involved in communication between FSFE and the local groups.  As far as
> I can tell I may be the first Irish (and Australian) member of the GA[1]
> but hopefully not the last.
> 
> Are local members based in Dublin or other parts of the country as well?
> 
> Can anybody make any comments about events in Ireland where the FSFE
> could have a presence or where it would be good to have visiting
> speakers talking about free software topics?  I give talks about free
> real-time communications from time to time and I can adapt the talk for
> different audiences, either developers or users/non-technical audiences.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Daniel
> 
> 
> 1. https://fsfe.org/about/team.en.html
> 
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