This year, we were presenting at the Linux Days in Chemnitz. The talk was about how to achieve full distribution with authorization in networked systems – of course using CAProck. The slides are in English, but the presentation itself was held in German.

Just over a week ago, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights hosted a consultation on human rights in technical standard-setting processes, which I managed to attend the first half of. I liveblogged some impressions, that deserve a summary here. Speaking were human rights researches, security standards contributors, and representatives of standards organizations. Niels ten Oever (@nllz@mastodon.cloud) is a researcher in the intersection of tech and human rights, and particiapates in IRTF together with the current chairs Mallory Knodel of the Center for Democracy & Technology and Sofía Celi of Brave Software.

Unfortunately, in 2023 there were no Interpeer related talks at FOSDEM – after a few years of virtual conference, FOSDEM had a large number of talk submissions to deal with, and ours did not make the cut. However, FOSDEM is not just about talks – it’s often more about the meetings in the hallways and gathering spots. And so Interpeer was still present at the conference. It won’t be useful to summarize all the different conversations at the conference.

Yesterday, I found myself accidentally live-blogging some thoughts on the EU Open Source Policy Summit 2023 event organized by OpenForum Europe. I say “accidental”, because I didn’t plan on doing so, but the first post got enough interest that I continued. It’s only fair to summarize my impressions today, after the fact. I’m leaving the conference with some mixed feelings. It’s been very clear that decades of FOSS advocacy have only recently gained traction, and there is still a lot of work to be done to bridge the gap between politics and FOSS.