Episode: 1087
Title: HPR1087: The FSCONS of Jonas Öberg 
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1087/hpr1087.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-17 18:42:04

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You're listening to Hacker Public Radio.
The topic of today's episode is The F.S. Cons of Junas Urbari.
Hello everyone, C.T. here.
Today I have a real treat for you.
Do you remember the conference F.S. cons that I've talked about earlier?
Well in late 2011 I am managed to get a few recordings from there that I know you will
really like, but first, what is it?
You all know the F.S.F. the free software foundation, you know, with Richard Stolman.
The F.S.F. has a SIST organization in Europe called F.S.F.E.
Free software foundation, Europe, yeah, well you got that.
If you have a look at the Wikipedia page for the F.S.F.E.
it says that F.S.F.E. has a structure of organizations which are official associates.
These are mostly national level free software groups.
And one of these groups are the Society for Free Culture and Software.
And if you have a look at the F.S.F.E. web page, you can read about it the following.
The Society for Free Culture and Software is a Swedish non-profit organization working
for a society built around a free exchange of knowledge, ideas and culture.
The Society works interdisciplinary and gathers in the conference F.S.C.S.
knowledge from several different groups, including creative commons, free software foundation
Europe, Wikimedia, free bit and E.F.M.
So in late 2011 I was there and let's hear what my reaction was, the second F.S.C.S.I attended.
So over to, yeah, right, over to me.
So I'm standing here at the IT University in Gothenburg and I am attending F.S.C.S.
It's very exciting.
I have been here since this morning and we are nearing lunchtime.
I have attended two talks and I've gotten one interview so far.
But I'm not alone.
I stand here with my co-host Henrik from the All in IT radio as well.
So tell me Henrik, what do you think of all this?
Hello.
Well, it's very new to me as I said that assembly was because I'm not from this world, so to
speak.
I don't know so much from it.
So it's very interesting to attend these speeches because I don't have anything, any knowledge
from it before.
You're more of a designer than a programmer, yeah.
And still you didn't attend the design talk, but rather the programming one.
Yeah, because I know more about cute than I know about gnome.
All right, so what do you think?
What have you heard this far, and what did you like, what you heard?
Yeah, the first speech we listened to by Foster when he talked about IVI, I recall the discussion
we had about IVI, so it was very interesting to connect that.
And the cute speech was very interesting.
I'm tempted to test out cute and let's see what it can do.
And I'm looking forward to the rest of the program as well.
Anything in special you have your eyes set on?
The last speech from Matias Klang about anonymity could be very interesting.
Yes, and I've heard Matias Klang lecture before and he is very entertaining and he is
very knowledgeable.
So hopefully perhaps I might be able to get an interview with him.
That remains to be seen.
So if there will be an FSconz 2012, will you be there?
I will be there together with you.
Of course, I wouldn't miss this for the world.
This is a really great conference.
No doubt about it.
Anything specific you really like here?
Well, I like that I haven't even beaten up yet.
All right, tell me.
Well, I'm doing a little social experiment here.
I'm wearing my Windows Phone 7 developer t-shirt that I got at the assembly just to see
how people react.
And so far so good.
Any comments?
Yeah, a few and most of them was pretty nasty.
Wonderful.
All right, what do you think of the venue?
What do you think of the locale?
Well, I think it's perfect for a event like this.
And it's a lot of what you call a conference rooms that are suited for these types of speeches.
The size are pretty what you can expect of it and the different floors that divide it.
It's a university.
That's sort of feeling gives, well, a university environment gives a certain feeling to
the event like this when it's this small as we are, 200 people, 250.
300.
300?
Oh.
Yeah, last year we were 292, I think.
And this year they said that it was a good number.
So they didn't sell more than 300 tickets.
And they were all sold out, sold out, of course.
Okay, anything else you want to tell the hacker public radio audience before we go
on with interviews and such?
Yeah, I think you should definitely check out the tickets for next year's event.
A good advice.
Thank you, sir.
And he really got a point there.
If you have any chance at all to attend FSCON's 2012, make sure you book the flight and book
the ticket.
Henry referenced the episode assembly overclocked of the All in IT radio.
It's episode 0, 0, 0, 9 and I will put a link in the show notes.
He also referenced the episode should cars get smarter, which was featured on syndicated
Thursday here on hacker public radio.
It was episode 854 of HPR, but I will link to that as well.
While people he mentioned was Jeremiah Foster, Duantilin and Matthias Klang, and you will
hear more from some of those, at least one of them, in a future episode of HPR.
But now it's time to talk about someone else.
And that someone is called Jumnas Urbari.
Previously, for seven years, he was the vice president for the free software foundation
Europe.
Right now he is the regional manager for creative commons in Europe, and he is also the executive
director of the society for free culture and software.
Or as it says on the FSCON's website, Jumnas is the major domo of the FSCON's family
and deals with all things financial or administrative.
And that is really true.
Jumnas is seen everywhere when you attend FSCON's, and he does everything.
If he isn't walking around making sure that everyone is feeling all right and having
a good time, you can see him transporting food and soft drinks.
And at one point, he was stacking t-shirts in the shop.
And this is when I got the chance to speak to him about previous years and future plans.
Once again, over to me.
So I'm standing here with the Jumnas.
Could you please tell the audience why you are here and what important part you are
playing here at FSCON's?
Yes, so I'm Jonas.
I'm one of the organizers of the conference, not together with Henrik.
I was one of the persons who took this initiative to launch the conference five years ago.
All right, under what umbrella is that?
So the conference is officially organized by the Society for Free Culture and Software,
for Henrik and Free Culture in Sweden.
It's a non-profit organisation here in Gothenburg and Sweden, and we deal with issues related
to free culture and free technology and free software generally.
And your name seems to pop up everywhere in the free software and the free culture community,
at least here in the west of Sweden.
What other projects are you involved in?
Well, I mean, it's difficult to have been in the community for so long without diverging
a little bit in your interest in what you're doing.
So some of what I've done is obviously historical and some of it is current.
The role I'm playing right now is the executive director of this Society for Free Culture
and Software.
So FSCON's obviously a major part of that.
We also do projects on accessibility and open access.
But my other hat, which I'm wearing right now, is the European Regional Project Manager
for Creative Commons.
So that's taking an increasingly large part of my work right now.
But I guess FSCON's will still be an important part of your life.
What are the plans for the future?
So what we would like to do with FSCON's is to bring this up and sort of what we felt
last year is that the conference has actually grown up, right?
We had it for four years and now it's in the fifth year.
So we have a routine and it's ongoing.
So we definitely want to do it again and we want to hack in more and slightly more interesting
areas.
Raise the discussion a little bit, get people talking.
And what I saw yesterday as well during the social environment is that we still have groups
of people sitting in different corners.
And I would really love to be able to bring those groups closer together.
So encourage the social reaction a little bit more.
And then we want to ensure that FSCON's is not just once a year, but that we actually
have other events that tie in to this entire FSCON's concept.
Because the concept of FSCON's is generally to bring together the three different areas
of society, culture and technology and see where they actually mix.
And I think we do that fairly well, but it's still just once a year.
So and we spend all the resources on once a year.
So that takes time and energy and we would like to do it more often, but maybe with smaller
events or complement this big event with smaller events and also make it truly Nordic.
So that we have something also in like Oslo and Helsinki or anywhere else in the Nordic
countries.
All right.
Well, I've noticed that there are a lot of what would I call it, hardcore hackers because
there isn't any real hacking technology event in this area or in Sweden generally really.
And as you said, there are also other groups here and of course always interesting to get
them to talk together.
Why, how did this goal for you evolve?
What is the roots for you feeling so strongly about this?
So the first ever FSCON's that we had was actually, I mean the acronym was the free software
conference.
And that's five years ago and we focused exclusively on free software.
But then we felt that well, we do have a large contingent in the Nordic region going to
events like Fostum in Brussels and we didn't want to replicate exactly the same conference
and we wanted to do something more.
And we started to think, what is it that actually we find interesting?
What is it that actually matters for us when we talk about freedom in technology?
And we came up that what we're lacking or what we want to see more of is actually to see
how we can actually make use of it, not just what it looks like and you know what it
technology is, but how is it actually used in a societal context?
And what kind of technology do we actually need in the future society?
Those questions are critical and we didn't find any good venue where these could actually
be discussed.
So that's why we decided to broaden scope and include the culture and society in the discussions
here to make sure that we get this mix of people.
Well sounds great.
How can people contribute and what do you want people to do as a next step?
Right, so there's a number of things obviously.
I mean, the first one is to get in touch with us.
I mean, we were very easy to reach in for fsconz.org and we'll be sure to get back to you
on that.
Other things that you can do is to have a look at the public information which is on
the fsconz Wiki because we have things like an fsconz manifesto which is quite important
when it explains exactly what we want to do with the conference and where we're going
in the future.
And we would really love to have more comments on this, to make sure that fsconz is not
just something that we organize once a year, but it's actually a community event in which
people can take part more actively during the year.
Sounds great.
I work, I've told this many times on the air, but I work as a teacher in secondary education
here in Sweden and I come in contact with a lot of pupils.
People, teens who are 18 or just below that, are there anything special that I can do
to raise the awareness of perhaps not just exclusively as fsconz, but the issues as well?
Well, I mean, the thing that I've found is that a lot of teachers, especially in those
ages, are a little bit afraid of touching upon these issues as well, which is a shame.
Because there's some feeling that there's a stupid technology or that the people will
be bored because you're talking about rather abstract concepts.
But what I've found actually is that I mean, people see if you teach them, talk to them
especially in these ages.
I mean, there is a sort of revolutionary striking that you can sort of attach to if you want.
And you talk about it in a slightly different way, but if you talk about it in terms of
how would they want to see the society in the future take shape?
And what would they like to have a staring put into this process?
Then they might be very responsive to this and it would be interesting to then engage
in that kind of discussion, sort of outside of the scope of free software or free culture
or free society, but yes, see where do you want to go?
And then I would be surprised if that does not tie back in with wanting to have a free
society.
That's true.
I found that one of the problems is if you start to talk about these kind of freedoms,
they have a hard time seeing farther than the nose can reach.
So it's the direct implementation of these concepts and that is, well, why should I care
about if something is really free since I can get everything for free on the internet?
I can download the latest movie, why should I care?
Do you have anything to counter that with?
Well, I mean, that's an interesting argument, of course, I mean, and especially, I mean,
at that point in time, you sort of lost the argument, you can't go into legal issues, right?
Because I mean, that's not going to stick, right?
What I try to do is I try to bring up things that are not as easily done or that are
sort of beyond the scope of what they can currently do, not in terms of software done,
but I talk, for instance, about replicating machines and 3D printers and things that I actually
bring this sort of concept of what is actually free to the next level, talking about actual hardware.
And if you can get the students interested in actually making something,
that might be their road in, so to speak, into this sort of community.
Because being able to draw something on your computer in 3D graphics and not having actually
produced and having this produced cheaply is an enormous power that I don't think should be
underestimated. And I think there's a lot of students that would be interested in this kind of
kind of building that is just now beyond the reach because the technology is too expensive.
It's interesting, you should mention these 3D printing machines, you had one here last year.
And I get to feeling ever so slightly, just make me, let me be clear, the talks are terrific and
they have stayed terrific, at least for the two ever cons I've been to, but the booths felt
more vibrant last year. And we had the people who set up the 3D printing area. Is this something you
are downsizing because you don't want it here or is it something that just happened and you
want to correct it further when you think about next year?
Right, so I mean this is an unintended consequence of another action, I would say.
So I mean that's an interesting input and I mean that's something that should definitely get
in writing to info.tfs.org as well. The reason why this was caused is that we last year we had
two, well we had four parallel tracks, two with workshops or one with workshop and two or three
with talks. So they were running in parallel during the both days. This year we decided to split the
workshops and have them only on the Friday and then Saturday and Sunday would be dedicated to talks,
but that also means that then the social events and everything that happens is Saturday and Sunday
gets influenced by the fact that we didn't actually have the workshops happening during the day.
Right, how was the attendance for the workshop since it was on a Friday, an ordinary work day?
Right, so the attendance was still I mean fairly good I would say. I mean it dropped between like
15-20 people for most of the sessions, which is the ideal size for a workshop if you want to get
something done. Right, so interesting. Sounds great. Any last comments before you move on,
you have a business schedule I understand? Nothing further from me. I'm just glad that you're
finally here and that we have this chat. I mean I'm really enjoying it and I'm looking forward to
doing more things to get in the future. Splendid, thank you.
That was Jonas Urbari at FSCON's 2011. If you want to attend FSCON's this year 2012,
you will have to go to Sweden, to Gothenburg, the 9th to 11th of November. Tickets hasn't been released
yet, but keep an eye on the FSCON's web page, which I will link to in the show notes.
If you cannot attend, well I'm sorry for you, but you can always watch most of the presentations
on Vimeo. Last year we had Richard Stolman, so it will be very interesting to see how they
top that, who will be the keynote speaker this year. That was everything for today. I will release
a few other interviews that I caught on tape further along as soon as I am able.
This has been CT for Hacker Public Radio.
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