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The Linuxwochen (translated "Linux-Weeks") are Austria's biggest GNU/Linux-related conference/exhibition. This year, they take place in six austrian cities, naturally including Vienna. So last week, from Thursday to Saturday our Vienna Fellowship Group was present at the Linuxwochen Wien 2008.

We had a booth with the typical Fellowship/FSFE merchandise and most of the flyers available from http://www.fsfeurope.org/documents/leaflets/. We also adapted the flyer from the Berlin Fellowship Group to our needs. The result can be found here (German).
 
This time, we had a really hard job, because this year the Linuxwochen Wien were aimed at beginners and people who want to switch to GNU/Linux. Convincing a GNU/Linux-nerd that it is good when he can use/study/share/improve the source is much easier than explaining the advantages or importance of Free Software to somebody who has just started exploring "the computer". However, I think we did a pretty good job, because we had many interesting and profitable discussions. We even had a few people that stayed for hours at our booth!

You can see some photos of our booth here, however, I soon got tired of making photos, so one only gets a glimpse of the event...

Last but not least we organised a talk, which was held by two Fellows and was specially aimed at beginners and people new to the idea of Free Software. Though we had the most difficult slot, namely the last one, where people tend to be tired and unreceptive, the feedback was really great, so the talk was definitely a success! You can download the slides (German) here.

Though those three days were really exhausting and stressful, we all enjoyed our time at the Linuxwochen and we are definitely looking forward to the next event!

Our Fellowship group from Vienna placed a booth in front of the Museumsquartier (on the corner of Mariahilferstrasse and Museumsplatz). We were there from 10:00 until 18:15 and raised awareness for the relevance of Free Document Standards among the many interested people who passed by. So we did wait until somebody came to us in the most cases, since there are so many organisations that ask to sign some petition or want you to donate something. This is why people tend to be rude and not receptive if you just start talking to them on the streets.

However, we were astonished to see how many people were interested in what we were doing. We were also surprised to reach so many different kinds of people with our message. There were people of all ages and all professions (we even met a soldier and a nun), so we can approve that open standards for electronic documents are important for everyone.

There also were many tourists from all over the world, who primarily wanted to ask the way. However, though they were on holidays, we were able to brief them about ODF too.

The first thing we did after telling the people that it is Document Freedom Day was to ask if they use a computer to write text, work with spreadsheets or presentations. Only two or three people did respond that they do not have a PC. The others, except for less than three people, did all use proprietary software and file formats. They were surprised to hear that this is not good for them. After some discussion most people were thankful for the new facts and took a flyer with them.

Apart from the great material we found in the starter pack we organised some flyers in german and some CDs with free software for reading/writing ODF for those without broadband connections.

Check out the Photos!

Along with the booth we also organised an online activity. Unfortunately, we all get an e-mail with an attachement in a proprietary format once in a while. On DFD we did strike back! We sent e-mails to all our contacts that besides an explanatory body also contained an attachement (german) in ODF format.