Talks and travels: FrOSCon, Germany

Two weeks ago, I had the pleasure and honour of delivering a keynote at the (milestone!) 20th edition of FrOSCon in Sankt Augustin, Germany.

My colleague David (one of the core developers on the Mastodon team) was one of the original founders of FrOSCon all the way back when it started, and the event is held near his home location, so it was a doubly wonderful opportunity for me to see him in person, and also to meet his family!

The last time I was in Bonn was in 1988, back then on a school trip exploring the Rhineland, in what used to be known as West Germany.

aside: I remember two things about that visit very distinctly – firstly, being in a group of youngsters that was closely tailed by security staff around a department store in Bonn, no doubt because shenanigans were afoot by some of my contemporaries (!); secondly, I had been given a Kodak disc film camera for a recent birthday, and the film shift mechanism broke during the trip, although one of my teachers tried to help me find a shop that could get it fixed, to no avail for such a niche device!

There have been many changes as a result of German re-unification and the compensation agreement between Berlin and Bonn, Vereinbarung über die Ausgleichsmaßnahmen für die Region Bonn. The university that hosts FrOSCon – Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences – is one of the institutions to have emerged as a result. The Open Source community is very fortunate to have such a wonderful venue to convene!

My talk was the keynote on the second day of the event. Due to unexpected circumstances I was only able to travel early on the Saturday and missed the opening of the event, but I arrived in time to see the huge interest in the keynote for day one: Daniel Stenberg of curl fame, talking about AI Slop Attacks on his development process. That was a fantastic talk, and I felt like it was a tough act to follow!

I spoke about the importance of federated, decentralised systems as a way to preserve access to information and to enable digital sovereignty.

I spoke about the creativity of humans, and our remarkable ingenuity in building the world in which we live.

We find ourselves in difficult places politically, economically, socially right now: but, there is room for hope.

Of course, I also mentioned how Mastodon and the Fediverse are important parts of the digital ecosystem as we work to build an alternative, better, social web for everyone.

The excellent folks from the Chaos Computer Club video operations team did a great job at capturing all of the talks from FrOSCon – you can watch my talk on their site, I’ll embed a YouTube version below here for some level of convenience for those who use that platform.

While I’m on the subject of the Fediverse, digital sovereignty, and FrOSCon, I’ll also point out some related talks of interest: Frank Karlitschek spoke about digital sovereignty; my colleague, David, spoke about Taking a Fresh Look at the Fediverse (updates in Mastodon, and in other projects across the ecosystem); and Georg Lukas spoke about reverse-engineering Samsung wifi cameras to post photos to Mastodon, which was a fun technical talk.

I am very grateful to the organisers, volunteers, hosts, and the Open Source community for the opportunity to re-visit this part of Germany after such a long time away. I was home again by 11pm on Sunday, exhausted but happy. Thank you for making my time with you so enjoyable!