Matthias Kirschner
Matthias Kirschner is President of FSFE. In 1999 he started using GNU/Linux and realised that software is deeply involved in all aspects of our lives. Matthias is convinced that this technology has to empower society not restrict it. While studying Political and Administrative Science he joined FSFE in 2004.
He helps other organisations, companies and governments to understand how they can benefit from Free Software -- which gives everybody the rights to use, understand, adapt, and share software -- and how those rights help to support freedom of speech, freedom of press or privacy.
In his spare time, together with his children and others he wrote the book "Ada & Zangemann - A Tale of Software, Skateboards, and Raspberry Ice Cream", which is available under Creative Commons in many languages and meanwhile also as a movie.
Sessions
During these "Tinkering Time" sessions, our young campers will be encouraged to imagine and build their own ideas and inventions.
As there was no book out there to explain my children why I love to tinker and experiment with technology and prepare them for a world which is highly influences by technology, I happened to write "Ada & Zangemann - A Tale of Software, Skateboards, and Raspberry Ice Cream". I was encouraged to share what I learnt in that process.
Matthias Kirschner author of the book, will present the video version in English of "Ada & Zangemann - A Tale of Software, Skateboards, and Raspberry Ice Cream" and together with his children who participated in the creation of the story, discuss the topic with people young and old. Then, enjoy a raspberry ice cream social with handmade ice cream by master tinkerer, Luca Bonissi.
This is a panel of long-running movement builders from Free Software campaigning, platform cooperatives, rural deliberative governance, and cross-sector bridging work. These folks will share what worked, what broke, and what they'd do differently to help others in designing campaigns, cooperatives, and coalitions that are shaping change in society.
Speakers on the panel include:
Matthias Kirschner (Free Software Foundation Europe) presenting on "Public Money? Public Code!" (PMPC), a movement started in 2017, that has been one of the most successful campaigns for digital rights. Matthias will unpack the specific choices that let a single campaign framework grow into a movement of more than 200 civil society organizations and over 39,000 individuals worldwide.
Guil Maueler (Regens Unite) brings five years of gathering climate activists, cooperators, DAO builders, ReFi protocols, DeSci collectives, artists, and policy nerds into the same room.
Olivier Schulbaum (Platoniq Foundation, Democratic Tech Fund) will share about solidarity funding infrastructure Goteo.rg, drawing lessons from 15 years of supporting community-led initiatives through crowdfunding, matchfunding, and what we now frame as "crowdvocacy." Concrete cases he'll discuss include street vendors’ organising, La Nuestra, a testimonial digital archive against gender-based violence, and emerging models from renters and care workers such as Las Kellys.
Ray Xiang closes the loop with Nantang, a rural reconstruction community in China with more than 20 years of cooperative organizing, whose experiments with mutual aid, local deliberation, and — more recently — DAO governance and digital identity tools show both the promise and the fragility of building shared rules, records, and trust in a living, ordinary community.
This panel is a working conversation about the thin, hard-won connective tissue between movements that share goals but rarely share a table.