At the end of this week will take place the 3rd edition of eLiberatica International Conference, one of the most important FLOSS conferences in Romania and Eastern Europe. As every year, important voices from Free Software/Open Source world will come to discuss with the participants the hottest topics. I think that one of the most important subjects could be about MySql , “Monty” Michael Widenius (who wrote more than 95% of MySQL code) and David Axmark (co-founder of MySqlAB) will speak about the new Monty Program (MariaDB) and the future of MySQL. Another remarkable presence is Danese Cooper or, “Open Source Diva”, who has an important background in the Open Source Movement, working 6 years as Chief Open Source Officer at Sun Microsystem and helping at the inception of important open source projects like: OpenOffice.org, Java.net, blogs.sun.com. This year, eLiberatica will have a video presentation of Richard Stallman who will explain why Free Software matters. Georg Greve, president of Free Software Foundation Europe will participate, as well.
This year, during eLiberatica Conference a series of other events will take place as well: Mozilla Event, RO FLOSS Communities Event, Open Agile and O’Reilly Event. I’m glad to see that this year there is a huge number of Romanian FLOSS Communities participating, having their own stand and sessions. I think that is great that eLiberatica, at its 3rd session, is following important points of its manifesto, such as developing and maintaining a healthy FLOSS movement in Romania. The local FLOSS communities have an important role in the future development of a “Free” Digital Society in a certain country, depending on a local FLOSS community, people can start using Free and Open Source Software and have a better understanding the Free Software Movement and its benefits. Saturday I’m going to speak about how to build and develop local communities, what’s the importance of a local community and why a local community should collaborate in the most “official mode” with the “mother project”. I will give some examples about Mozilla in the Romanian Community and how Firefox marketshare in Romania has been growing since its inception. I would also like to interchange experiences with other Romanian FLOSS communities to search for a way to collaborate all together, in order to see what’s good and what’s wrong at FLOSS communities in the present and what we could improve in the future. Looking forward to meet you at eLiberatica.