FSCONS Blog

I have to share this! Today I got a phone call from the Swedish Ministry of Enterprise, Energy and Communications regarding FSCONS 2009. The background is that in early 2009, we submitted a request to the ministry to have FSCONS 2009 be a part of the events organised around the Swedish presidency of the European Union during the fall of 2009. We felt that it would be important and relevant to highlight the political aspects of Free Software and Free Culture and encourage a broader participation in the conference. We never heard anything from the ministry about this, despite two attempts at getting a response from them. When we did not hear anything, we assumed that we fell outside of the scope of what the ministry wanted with the presidency and proceeded, as we always do, with the conference without their support. The phone call today asked if we could send a copy of our material for FSCONS to them, since they had noticed in their records that they were missing this. When I inquired further, it turns out that Åsa Torstensson, the Swedish minister for Communications, had responded positively to our request already on the 8th of june 2009! According to the person who called, she was intrigued by the conference and our activities here and were keen for us to be seen as part of the Swedish presidency of the European Union. Unfortunately, we never got that reply. In some way the issue was lost between two chairs, and we carried on with things without Åsa or the ministry. But I'm happy that they are at following up on things, and will likely investigate this on their end to figure out what went wrong. And I think we should be happy as well that Åsa and the ministry was with us in spirit during 2009, even if we didn't know it at the time :-) Original post: http://fscons.org/2010/news/fscons-part-swedish-presidency