Software Freedom Kosovo 2019

It’s been a while I last posted on my blog, but I’ll try to keep up and post more in the upcoming weeks. Life has been a bit busy and I haven’t been inspired much to write, but here it goes, a short report below on the SFK 2019 conference.

Software Freedom Kosova (SFK) is the annual international conference held in Kosovo organized to promote free/libre open source software, free culture and open knowledge. The eighth (8th) edition took place this time between 4-7 April, in Pristina, Kosovo, after two years of off-time. Based on my estimations, it gathered approximately two hundred participants.

The conference featured a diverse program of topics of interest of workshops held in the mornings and talks held in the afternoon, as well as socializing time between speakers and participants. The conference started with School of FLOSS at Termokiss on Thursday morning, an intro level series of workshops aimed at beginners covering topics from HTML to Wikipedia editing. The conference was formally opened on Thursday evening with registration, a panel discussion, cocktail and a movie. The talks and workshops were held at Kino Armata and at the National Library of Kosovo.

I hanged around with colleagues of mine from Ura Design and had fun around the city, also meeting old friends from Pristina. The weather was good so we could roam around easily.

As an animal lover, I couldn’t not visit Dit’ e Nat’, a coffee-library near the center of the city. A lovely cat roams around the shop, as you can see in the photo below.

I was present at SFK’19 as a speaker and had a workshop named “How to setup a private and secure system in 2019”. The workshop explained ways how to setup your own personal system from the ground up to be as secure/private as possible, from operating system choices, browsing habits, extensions, applications, smartphones etc. Many other friends and members from the Open Labs Hackerspace were also present at the conference.

The workshop went fairly well and the room was full. Unfortunately, the topic being new to the audience and a bit hard to understand if you’re a complete beginner, made me deviate from my original plan and explain things in the easiest way possible.

After my presentation, I had the pleasure to be part of an awesome workshop from Douglas Arellanes about Mural, a visual storytelling tool that helps you sequence your visual story, and then generates everything needed for that story to be displayed on most modern web browsers and served from any web server.

The workshop was interactive and we went around the Library taking videos and photos to use in a new Mural project. You can check out a video and photo below.

Afterwards, we had a nice dinner with the other speakers and to top it up, Doug and Valmir were the DJ-s for the night for us at M Club 😊 On Monday I participated at the OpenStreetMap Mapathon at the Prishtina Hackerspace to help map Kosovo roads.

(Photo under CC-BY 4.0 FLOSSK)

My presence in SFK’19 was a positive experience that I really enjoyed, and I hope to be there again next year. The local community is actually discussing about organizing an OSM conference soon, so that may be the reason of my next visit in Kosovo, why not.

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