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EPFSUG was first publicly announced at FOSDEM 2011. One year later we want to come back and tell the world what happened, what we do now, and what our plans are. We currently constitute 1 patron, 11 members and 25 supporters.We have a website, some mailing lists and a pad. EPFSUG is a user group, but it's complicated. Most members have standard EP office workstations with very little free software running. At the same time, most of EPFSUG's supporters are hackers and overall very proficient free software users.We try to bridge the gap application by application. Our first project for opening up the possibility to use free software in the European Parliament is tmail - a server workaround to let you use your mail with IMAP - and with it new simple ways to have basic email privacy. So far not much has happened in practice on the EP office workstations, but we have at least initiated a dialogue with the decisionmakers at the European Parliament, and it looks like Firefox will soon be available on the standard EP office workstation. The third big project will of course be word processing, but we have not worked so much on that yet. We also come together to talk about free software in society at large (ie. the world outside the EP) so we have had meetings on FreedomBox, ParlTrack, Ubuntu Unity and CiviCRM, and the hacker perspective on reverse engineering the law making process... tmail allows European Parliament mail users to access their mail through IMAP anywhere.pad.epfsug.eu has an open private Etherpad for collaborative text editing.We currently operate five mailing lists for discussions relating to Free Software in the EP.We post our content on Vimeo, Status.net, and stream meetings live on bambuser, and some of our supporters are on IRC all the time. We organize regular meetings and events in the European Parliament to draw attention to important issues regarding free software, open standards, and access to technology.Everybody is welcome to come, just follow our mailing list!Patrons of EPFSUG are MEPs that support Free Software and pledge to support EPFSUG in their capacity as MEP. We currently have one patron, Indrek Tarand.Members are people working within the European Parliament who wish to use, study, share and improve Free Software.Supporters are people from outside the European Parliament who wish to help out and draw attention to the importance of free software within the EP. Our supporters say
"Free Software is important for a democracy." - Rishab Aiyer Ghosh"The European Parliament and other European institutions should only use Open Source software." - Andreas Kuckartz"As a politically engaged citizen, I expect all the EP's documents, audio/video recordings, webpages, and means of participation to be accessible by everyone, without software choices being imposed on citizens." - Ciarán O'Riordan"I share the vision of the Parliament setting an example as a public institution with regards to the use of free software and open standards."- Jonatan Walck"The use of free software would be an important step for European political bodies towards becoming more open" - Kirsten Fiedler"For me free (libre) software is a cornerstone of democratic governance." - Konstantin D. A. Scheller, MEP assistant EPFSUG events and members
Use the Thin Edge, Strong Man!
http://epfsug.eu
epfsug@epfsug.eu