 Did you know your mobile phone has more processing power than the computers that put astronauts on the moon? That's a lot of power in your hands. Computers are everywhere today and the software running on them does amazing things. It runs the phones we used to stay in touch, cars that take us places and pacemakers that keep people alive, but sometimes software restricts you by censoring messages or by preventing you from sharing media with friends. When you can't see or change how software works, you lose control of your data and your privacy. We believe that the right to use, study, share and adapt software is essential to liberty. Free software foundation Europe, keeping the power of technology in your hands. Alright FSFE, 20-50 years! That's a nice one. You want to have it again? How do I do that? I have no clue how to do that. The FSFE would not be possible and I cannot stress this enough. It would not be possible to do what we're doing or what we have been doing for the last 15 years without you, our fellows and our volunteers. I think we should all give ourselves a big hand again for that. We are just warming up, there's going to be more opportunities to clap your hands. I know that look in your face, that's the look of people who realize that I am standing between you and the party. So don't worry, we're going to make this recently funny and recently entertaining as well as you can because we're still a bunch of hackers. And then we're going to proceed directly from here over to sea base where there's drinks and eventually there will also be pizza coming in. So I hope that you'll enjoy and stay around for that. This video, by the way, which you just saw, could you imagine that not only do you have the video in the language which you just saw, but you also have subtitles. We have subtitles of that in 11 languages. Thanks to all the wonderful translators. That's an amazing feat. So all of you contributed to making that possible. Thank you so, so much. As I said, during the evening now we're going to award, reward and honor a lot more of our volunteers. But before we do that, before we head off to sea base, I wanted to bring you back in time, just a tiny bit, to take you on a trip through history. Now for those of you who don't know me, which is probably a few of you, my name is Jonas. I'm currently the executive director of the FSFE. I was one of the co-founders all those 15 years ago. But I actually would like to start a little bit before that. I would actually like to take you well before 2001. Now, many of you know the history of the Free Software Movement. That's reasonably well documented. But many of you, I, a wager, might have missed the name Jeremy Puzo. Doesn't that name ring a bell for anyone? Okay, curious. In 1986, that's 30 years ago today, he did one of the things which eventually would become one of the core activities of the FSFE. Racing Public Awareness of Free Software. In 1986, the way that he did this was that he helped contributing to launching the Gnu's Bulletin. The half-yearly advocacy leaflet from the Gnu project. And I thought just to establish the historic context of where we find ourselves today, I would like to read a small section from the introduction of that first Gnu's Bulletin, because yeah, it was 30 years ago. And we're going to listen to Jeremy explain who was actually working with the Gnu project at that time, who was sitting in Boston. You might find this amusing, I know I did. First and foremost, there's our porcupine, Richard M. Stolman, the founder of Project Gnu. Then there's Leonard Tower, Gnu's teddy bear. Len is Gnu first and so far only paid full-time employee. Gnu's hawk, Bob Chassel, is the world's only generous treasurer. Among our volunteer hackers, there's Dean Elsner, our world-hopping platypus. I originally called him a kangaroo, but he insists he's a platypus. In case you haven't guessed, Dean comes from Australia and Dean is writing Gnu's Assembler. Another Australian, Richard Mlynatic, is acting as Gnu's Emacs guru. I'll try calling him a kangaroo and see what happens. Eric Albert, I'm going to pause here for dramatic effect while you revel in the similarity between Eric Albert, 30 years ago, and our own Eric Albert, who helped make this event possible. Eric Albert walked in off the street on January 24th. So far, he's sped up the Gnu LD command to be faster than Unixus. It was much, much slower. Eric claims that he is Gnu's, bear with me, humuhumu nuku nuku apua, the current state fish of Hawaii. We're very happy to have the help of such a rare fish. Me, my name's Jerry Puzo. I answer the mail and I send up tapes. Tapes, yes, of course. 30 years ago, this is 1986. Magnetic tapes were the way in which you could land your hands or get your hands on the coveted Gnu MX distribution. $150, quite a bit of money at that time, actually gave you an industry standard, 1,600 BPI, I imagine, magnetic tape containing MX, scheme, hack, and bison, sort of essential tools for a budding hacker at the time. The early days of the free software movement were, obviously, rather technical, as you can imagine. Jerry described Gnu LD, just one of the many commands, to be much faster than the proprietary equivalent. And quite often, this was how people got hooked with free software in the first place. It was faster, better, more user-friendly, and on top of all that, it was free. If we fast forward in time a little bit, about 13 years ahead, quite a lot has happened in the world since then. We're no longer dealing with broken malloc implementations of different Gnu MX distributions. We don't need to ship our own memset function because we can't trust the one on the system, and the free software community is no longer only technical. A lot of people have come to this because the political awareness in the movement is growing. There's more people coming on board as writers, as translators, as artists, as graphic artists, and so on and so forth, and everyone is contributing to making the free software community what it is today. And of course, the ideals of the free software community is applied to other areas as well. Free culture, open data, open hardware, Creative Commons was founded in about the same year as the Free Software Foundation Europe. And just to show you exactly how closely these are related, I'll tell you one short story. So it's about Creative Commons. About four or five years ago, Creative Commons launched an interesting path to renew their licenses, to release the Creative Commons 4.0 license. I was sitting with Diane Peters, who's a legal counsel of Creative Commons, and we're sitting not far from here, actually, here in Berlin. And we were discussing the latest draft of the 4.0 license of Creative Commons. And I had a sort of sticky point, and we were wondering how do we phrase this in a reasonable way, and how do we solve this problem? And Diane, in sort of her use of style, she brings up this huge binder that she has next to her. And so I was leafing it through and said, that's not a problem. We'll just look and then copy whatever they did in the GPL. So that's where Creative Commons comes from, right? But let's go back just to the years before founding the FSFE. That was in the almost midst of a sort of dot-com boom, if you can even call it that time. Italian Romano Prodi was the president of the European Commission, you might remember him. Tony Blair presided over the rotating presidency of the European Union. Tony Blair was actually the first one to establish a website for the presidency. That's just before the FSFE. In free software news, of course, Fustam had barely gotten off the ground. Companies working with free software, at least in the US, were going public head over heels. The so-called Halloween documents were released in 1998 showing how Microsoft and other large corporations were really starting to treat free software as a serious threat to their models. Netscape released Netscape Communicator, and it was in this era of free software history when the idea came to start an organization like the Free Software Foundation Europe, an organization that would be distinctly different from the FSF, both personally and financially, doing things in a slightly different way, but serving the same community. Now, a lot of people contributed to that idea, and it wouldn't do me justice to anyone to try to speak for all the various ideas that came together to found this. But for me, the discussion started around 1998. It was in a discussion with RMS, and then later with Tim Ney, who was the then executive director of the Free Software Foundation in the US. And we're talking about charitable donations in Europe, the problems of it, and what we could do to further free software. And Tim wrote an email to me in the middle of 1998 to 1999 saying that, quote unquote, given that regulations regarding deductions to French charities are so complicated, maybe the focus should be on Germany. Now, he didn't know it at the time, but a few years later, he got his wish. And a few of us, in May of 2001, we gathered at the Linux Hotel at Villa Fogelstein in Essen to found the Free Software Foundation in Europe. And I think it is fitting now, at this time, to introduce to you to one of the people who helped us get where we are today. Ladies and gentlemen, the first president of the Free Software Foundation in Europe, Georg Greve. Thank you, Jonas. 15 years, huh? Yes, I actually just also traveled back in time mentally a little bit to where we were back in those days. And I mean, Jonas and I actually, I think we ran into each other a few times, because I joined the GNU project in the mid-90s. I wrote an application called the X-Logmaster, which was actually a way to get out of the whole thing that you had your terminal windows open. It had tail running in all of them continuously, trying to get an idea of what's running in the system. And so I wrote an application that would actually bundle that in one window and even grab for patterns that you might be interested in and alert you. The Apache developers told me back then that they were using it a lot. And Richard was stumbling over and invited me into the GNU project. So that's how I initially joined the GNU project. I came through technology, through my love of technology, through always having been a technologist, into the GNU project. And it didn't end there. This is not where this story stopped for me, right? It wasn't about the technology anymore. And I can actually pinpoint the time where it stopped being only about the technology. It became about society. And that's 1998 for me. At that time, there was a project here in Germany in Pada Bon, in fact, to create the clown, the cluster of working nodes. It was the very first attempt to build a distributed super computer with Linux, as people were still calling it at those days as well. It was initiated by the Linux Magazine. Me and my roommates at the time, we drove down with our private PCs and hooked them into that cluster. And given that I had registered with a GNU org email address, I was asked by Tom Schweller, the editor-in-chief of the Linux Magazine back in those days, whether I wouldn't actually want to tell participants what the GNU project is all about, because he figured people didn't really know. Well, to be honest, I didn't really know all that much about it myself back then. So I started reading. I read a lot. I thought a lot. I hopefully understood a bit and then gave my very first speech about the GNU project. Back in the night in Pada Bon, 1998. And that, for me, is actually, it's really interesting because I can pinpoint my enlightenment, if you so will, to that very night, in a way. Because after that, I became aware that what we're talking about here is not just technology. It's about writing the rules of future society. It's nothing less than that. And we write rules that, in many ways, more binding, more strongly influencing societies than law can be. Lawrence Lessig later also codified this as code is law. But to me, that was the moment when I became aware of this. Based on my speech, Richard, that made me a GNU speaker, it's actually still transcribed. It should still be up on GNU.org, I think. That very first speech. So you can check whether that's accurate. So you can check me. But I then ended up writing the brave GNU world for the Linux Magazine for, I think, about seven years, monthly column. It got spread all over the place. There was volunteers stepping up. I mean, I remember my very first English proofery, actually, at Telsock Win, who sadly no longer with us and with a dear friend. We have been able to grow this from that moment on in terms of spread of the message as well as understanding of it. But remember, 1998 to 2000, 2001, right? Free Software was still kind of like McCarthyist communism, right? And people were, I mean, this was the software patent debate. People were thinking, yeah, but this is against economy, right? Nah, you don't want that. We were deliberately thinking about, do we link this software patent debate with the Free Software debate? Because if we do, do we damage the software patent battle because people have misconceptions about Free Software as well? So, do we need to fight two battles simultaneously or do we fight one and stay hidden in that? And at the same time, try to fight the other openly. Which is the strategy we ultimately took. And in all of this, I mean, becoming aware of why this all mattered. For me, there was this moment where I realized that Free Software as a principle was so important that it could not remain in only one structural vessel and it could not remain only on one pair of shoulders to carry the intellectual burden forward. I mean, we're all humans, right? We all die, unfortunately. I mean, I'm not very motivated to do that, but I think I have no choice. So, I realized we needed to structurally think about this differently and that's where my thoughts about the FSFE came from. What I wanted, what I had in mind was an association that would be shaped by many people that would actually come together and distribute that load over multiple shoulders in which we work together as a community. It had to be shaped and driven by the active people who actually do things. And it could not ever depend solely on me. That was actually for me design goal zero, if you will. I wanted to make myself irrelevant as quickly as possible. It should not depend on me. Now, of course, if you've ever started to work on anything, that's kind of hard to do in the first year, right? I mean, in the beginning, these organizations are very fragile little things and on top of that, the problem is that power structures, even when they are not formal, they can be informal. And some people live very well in them, right? They have a social informal authority that they do not necessarily like to subject to, say, democratic process or consensus finding in a larger group. And that, not everyone likes ultimately making themselves part of a bigger picture for the sake of having a better process and a more stable structure. So we had our turbulent first years. It was not always so easy, but in my back then, I guess, still youthful naivety, I thought someone had to do it. And no one else was stepping up to the plate, so I figured, all right, I'll just, you know, not take any other job. I mean, I was a physicist at the time, I still am. I offered my PhD spot in a new nanotechnology institute that I could have taken. I could have worked as a software developer, which I'd done before, or I could do this social organization that was trying to create political change. I don't know, I mean, it probably takes a certain amount of insanity to do this, I realize in hindsight. In particular, so as of course, we had no money, right? So I took a personal credit from the bank, started working full-time. I think my monthly salary first year was something in the 200 euro round-ish. So just anything to get it off the ground, right? So we started, we struggled, but we also succeeded. But we also succeeded. We succeeded in finding people that joined that vision, that worked with us, that saw what we were trying to build, and that, you know, contributed in all the various ways in which any organization like FSFE can only ever live off contribution. I mean, we can only succeed together. There's no way this organization can work without every single one inside and outside this room that is part of it. In one way or another, if you are in any way engaging with FSFE, you're actually part of it. I'm sorry, you are. And so we actually managed to get some traction, we managed to get our first successes, and I'm actually still quite proud of some of them. But then at some point, you know, we actually figured out that we became structured enough that we suddenly attracted people from the outside world that were not technologists. I actually think there was a fantastic sign, I was very happy about that, because we suddenly had people, you know, applying for internships out of the blue who did not have an actual technical job. Like they did not have a technical profile in the background. And people were skeptical, right? They were like, are these people really the right people to, you know, I mean, we're a technical community, you know, should we really offer them internships? There was a lot of skepticism around in those days and also whether we could actually offer them internships that, you know, would work for them and, you know, whether we would be doing them justice and all these kind of things. And of course, we figured as an ethical group we'd have to pay them. So it was a certain struggle and I remember meeting the very first intern of the FSFE. It was very funny because I had a girlfriend in Lausanne at the time whom I was visiting and then I had a trip to another conference from Geneva. So it was on the train from Lausanne to Geneva having agreed on an interview in Geneva, an airport actually that I met Matthias for the first time. Who in the beginning said, oh, I wanna do an internship and just gotta know, sorry, we can't do that, you know, no way. He kept at it, right? I mean, for me, the persistence that he showed in wanting to be part of this, I said, all right, life is not fair. The universe is not fair. If you don't give people that are this persistent, this consistent, that determined a chance. So I met him and actually we ran into each other on the train and we started talking there and I knew that moment that all the concerns we had in the General Assembly back in those days, right? All the concerns that people put on the table, no, we had to do this. We absolutely had to do this. It was necessary and Matthias was just the first of very many. I mean, the FSFE internship program is actually something that, I mean, Matthias created, in a way, with his persistence, right? And that I am maybe unjustly, but anyhow, quite proud of. I think the FSFE internship program, in particular, by not pulling only on technical people, does an incredibly important job because it takes people from other fields, social sciences, law, across the board and helps them get up to speed on the values of our community and then sets them free because they're all exceptionally awesome people. They end up in really interesting places, right? But they have the spirit of Frasofta with them. So I'm actually really, really proud of what we achieved in those days and I'm actually, I mean, really happy to see you as president today. It's somehow, for me, it's an interesting continuity in terms of how, you know, Carsten as well, he came actually after Matthias. I remember that Carsten, our former president, unfortunately had to leave already. I wish he was here. He was approaching us after a speech, I think, in Lüneburg, right? So, I mean, we started to draw in all these people. You know, the whole thing started to take shape and a life of its own. And while I actually was initially thinking I could step down in 2007, back then we were in slightly rocky waters. I was a little bit difficult. So we figured that, well, all right, you know, maybe I should stay a little bit longer. But then in 2008, I ultimately was able to declare to the assembly that I would not run next year. And, you know, we would have to find someone else to do this in future because for me, the fact that FSFE routinely rotate its leaders is an essential part of this organization. The fact that we, you know, share the responsibility and we have other people in leadership roles and make that a normal part of our organizational life is absolutely required. It is not healthy for the organization if the founder stays in the top role forever. And so not healthy for the founder either, by the way. I mean, it would not have been good for me or the organization. As I think it's the case for many other organizations where we see those patterns, it's hard to survive the founder, right? The person who first put in all the work. So I think the fact that we could do that speaks to this organization in a good way. And I spent my 2008 to 2009 largely cleaning up the messes that I have made the years before. And believe me, there were many. Trying to have as clean a ship as I could, right? For the next captain. So I did what I could to prepare that transition, hand it over all the contacts and, you know, seeing how Carson took office and actually continued from there and the organization kept growing year after year. The organization kept being more successful. FSFE is bigger, better and more successful now than in my times. For me, that is actually in a way the ultimate testimony of having done my job, you know, as the midwife, if you will, well enough. Because that was the ultimate goal to create something that is bigger than myself. We are all part of something that is bigger than ourselves. And that to me is what defines the FSFE. We have a mission, we have values, we work to spread those values, but that idea, that ideal is bigger than any of us and to work together to achieve it. And I look very much forward to, you know, when in further 15 years we're sitting together and then Matthias will be, you know, with gray hair as well. We will all go like, ooh, you know, remember those days. And we don't know who's the president then. I'm sure it's gonna be an awesome person. Maybe one of you, who knows? I don't know. I'm looking forward to that anyhow. Thank you very much. Thanks, Georg. A lot of things has happened over the years. It's impossible to even give a, you know, fraction of a glimpse into everything. Quite quickly, as in 2001 already, when we started, we established really what Georg was talking about. We wanted to actually have an influence. We wanted to influence the environment around us. We're not a technical community. We want to actually make an impact. We established a legal team, which, or the basis of it at least, today continues to be one of our primary activities. We did actually quite a bit of policy work already in 2001. I mean, that's, you know, one of the things we realized quite early on that we wanted to do. But as, you know, as Georg said, our organization struggled over the years at various points. You know, it has its ups and downs. One of the ones, you know, I obviously remember is the pain that we were feeling around about 2005, when the original office that we had, which was actually donated to us and held in Villa Fogelsang in Essen, where everything started, that office was run on donated time and it's really handling a lot of the back end of our work, like shipping, merchandise, back and forth, managing, accounting, and money in and out and everything. And they were really starting to struggle at the time. And it was a blocker for the organization. And that's one of those discussions that took a long time internally to clarify as well, until we finally then in 2006 took the step to actually establish our own office in Düsseldorf and hired a person who could actually work with us there. And that office actually was responsible for the merchandise and a lot of our materials that we shipped all around Europe for 10 years up until just earlier this year. So we owe a huge amount to that community and to the Düsseldorf area as well for keeping us afloat during all these years. And I think that deserves an applause as well. Now, around the same time, around 2005, we also established the fellowship program. Now, how many here are fellows? Okay, fair amount of you. Now, you're lucky that you're not called something else. There is a lot of crazy ideas going around at a time. All right? Now, I'm not going to go through all of them, but let's just say that you could have been called Freedom Ants and Bees. I'm not sure if that would have been better. As Georg was mentioning, around the same time in 2004, we did recruit our first interns, or as Georg said, they actually recruited us. That's a more accurate description of it. We're going to get back to Matias, but just to get the chronology straight through all our precedents, I'm going to mention Carson, obviously. Carson, who, yeah, he couldn't be with us here today. I hope that you saw his talk about presenting from Siemens yesterday. But yeah, he couldn't join us this evening. So I thought that instead I will just borrow just a few snippets of his own words from when he stepped down two years ago now, roughly two years ago, as I think that he described the organization and the challenges ahead of us quite well. I wrote like this. The challenges for free software have changed a lot over the past decade. We constantly need to think about how to maintain and defend our autonomy and agency in an age when governments and corporations are prying into every detail of our lives every day. In the face of these challenges, I'm proud of what we've achieved these past years. The FSFE has grown to strong advocate for users' rights and an important voice in the debate around privacy and autonomy. FSFE is a rare beast in the NGO landscape, combining a large community of local activists and supporters with professional policy work at the EU and national levels. Getting these different lines of work to support each other is something that requires constant attention, but it's also very rewarding. So despite Carson not being here, let's also give him a big round of applause. Now, we get to our next president, the current president. I just read out, because I think these are actually, they're very nice words. The words that Georg used when he described his first meeting with Matthias. I'm not going to go into a lot of stuff, but just to explain what Matthias was up against. So Georg wrote and said, we told him multiple times about the problems that would have to be solved, but he was indeed pretty perseverant and showed quite a bit of dedication, dedication that he continues to have for the organization to this day. Ladies and gentlemen, Matthias Kirschner. Thanks a lot. Yeah, so how did I end up applying there? My father once introduced me to computers and showed me a little bit of programming with basic and I thought, oh, that's cool. You can change the background color by adding some lines of code there. And then I lost a bit sight of computers for some years and I was interested more in politics and I asked my father several times to subscribe to more newspapers. So I have several sources of information I don't have to rely on just one newspaper. And he said, oh, that's too expensive, but I heard there is this internet and there you can inform yourself from all kind of sources. So I buy a modem and a computer for you and then we do this. I think in the end it would have been cheaper to pay for the subscriptions, but yeah, that's how I was one of the first people in my school with a modem. And a few years later, I got a second computer and they were connected with each other with one of those cables to the other room and somehow I thought, oh, it would be cool if I could send an email from my computer to the computer where my brother is sitting and also they were email programs on both of those computers. I was not able to do that without dialing up to the internet and then I was complaining about that in school and a friend said, oh, I have a solution for that and a few days later he brought me some floppies and CDs and said, here, with this you can achieve this and well, a few days later and a lot of phone quotes later with this friend I was able, I saw some black screen with some white fonts on there and a few weeks later I even had a graphical user interface and it took me several months till, and years till I was able to install an email server and play around with that but that was the beginning of that and I got so interested in this and it was so cool to meet so many people who deal about this technology and that you can learn everything there and all the people, they were so friendly they were mailing lists and then we were setting up a local free software group and we were going to the Linux talk which at that time was in Stuttgart and there are some people who told me oh, there was a crazy guy here walking around with a floppy on his head I was thinking, oh, okay I didn't know Richard Storm at that time so I got interested in this and I was starting to read what's available there about free software and I read a lot of the GNU philosophy pages and I thought, wow, that's really cool it's not just about technology it's about social aspects it's about political aspects about economic aspects and at that time most people, when I wanted to talk with them about this in school, they didn't want to hear that there were also very few who wanted to talk with you about the technical things of free software but the political ones were way, way less and that was the time when I decided okay, with these technical things I can always learn and there are lots of people who help me with that but there's nobody who can help me with these political things so I decided to study politics and so I went to university and I was thinking more about okay, how is this going to be in our society how do we distribute power when there's such a lot of power is concentrated with technology and so that got me more and more interested and there was this time in my studies that I had to do a seven month internship and at university I once was walking at the campus and then I heard some people before me yeah, and there's a DBN, the PowerPC oh, wow, stop and that's how I met a DBN developer there or two actually and at the time for the internship I asked them where can I apply, where can I do something where I can connect my political interests and my free software interests he said, oh yeah, there is in Germany the federal office for IT security and there is a free software foundation Europe they also have an office here in Germany but okay, good for the ministry for the federal office of IT security it was very easy, they had internships and you can do this say where you would like to do it I did that, send them the papers and for FSB it was very difficult anything there and then I called the number which was written on this website and asked about an internship and oh, internship I'm just taking a call here maybe you can send an email and so I wrote an email and I replied, yeah, we never had interns but till that phase I already read so much of the I think at that time I read the entire FSB website and I thought I thought, okay, that's I really want to go there, that's really cool and I got the first answers, yeah, we didn't have interns I said, yeah, maybe I can be the first one I got an answer we cannot pay you anything I said, yeah, I'm also not paid for being a student then there was this reply that yeah, we don't have an office it's just an address a postal address and I was proposing maybe I could also work from the Boston office if nothing else works out but I really want to have this internship and at one point that was I think Georg sent me his travel schedule and we had a phone call and I was very nervous because my English was very, very, very bad at that time and I thought, oh no, no, is he German I don't know what language do I have to speak English and then I called him and so in the end it was all fine and I got a travel schedule, we can meet here at Boston in Brussels, we can meet here a few hours at the Munich airport or here in Luzon at the airport and because I was studying in Konstanz I decided, okay, I go to Luzon that's the closest and then yeah, we met there and the postal address of FSFE, that was something before was very nice, Villa Vogelsang very nice pictures Villa after this whole process and after Georg was able to convince the others I ended up at a sofa in Georg's one room apartment in Hamburg so there was a sofa here Georg's table over there and here his bed and in the morning I was going online and then after some time Georg wrote okay, nobody else here anymore, you can come and yeah, so I started the internship in Hamburg and that was the best time of my studies ever so I met so many cool people there and it was I got introduced to people who fought against the software patents, we were in the court case against Microsoft and supporting the European Commission and all those things going on, there were people pried out of these court cases and we were sitting there in Hamburg, hacking writing emails and traveling around Europe and that was something that Georg said if you can accomplish it, that they pay for the travel, you can come with me so I wrote to some Turkish organizer and prefers to travel with his assistant and so he said, okay and then I asked Georg what does that mean he said, yeah, you're going with me and yeah, so I was traveling around Turkey in Istanbul and in Dublin and meeting so many people in Europe who are working for free software all people interested in the same topics I was interested that was just the best feeling ever and then after after some time Georg asked me, well, we have this project here, codename fellowship and it's supposed to start next foster but we haven't had so much progress there, can you look at that and help and that's how I started to help with the setting up the fellowship program, how we helping to get the logo in Hamburg with some meetings with Stefan Richter so that it was to start there and then we started it at FOSSTEM which was also amazing, it was the coolest free software conference till then I ever participated in and yeah, from there way too short my internship was over and Georg said, well it would be really nice to hire you also but you should continue to do your studies but it would be really nice if we would have someone in Berlin to do some lobby work there and I was travelling with Georg and others and also participated in some meetings and I thought, well, yeah, that's that sounds good so I decided okay, I'll switch my university and I moved from Constance to Berlin and that's how, yeah, then I then volunteered some years in Berlin doing lobby work there and talking with politicians about free software and finally then in 2009 when Georg left, I was employed then and yeah somehow it was always too nice to do something else and that's because of all the people I met and a lot of them are here in the room and that's for me one of the things which is most important for me that there are so many so awesome people in FSFE and I think we will continue with that and have even more awesome people in future but thanks a lot that you are here with us and we walk this path together, thanks a lot we've listened to a lot of challenges that people have to get engaged in the FSFE we're a little bit better today obviously we can still improve but as all our organisations as we go through the evening and I hope that you'll now join us at the sea base whenever you get a bunch of old friends like us together it's very natural that we're going to talk about history but of course my sincere hope is that we're not only going to talk about history but we're also going to look ahead and see what the next 15 years has for free software and especially the Free Software Foundation Europe so with that I'm going to leave you here we're going to gather outside the front doors in about 10 minutes time and then we're all going to sea base for drinks and eventually dinner thank you all