My FSCONS

Situated on the “freedom” side of technology, the Free Software movement strives for equal possibilities of all citizen to use, modify, adapt and copy software for their purposes. Even if Free Software is open to everyone's use and contribution, this is hardly the case in reality. On the opposite, it is seen as a closed movement of people with often a similar description: mostly white, mostly young, mostly Western country citizen, mostly male. Why is free software associated with this white-young-male personality and not with something else? Does software reproduce identities and ideologies, and if so, how can contributors and users of Free Software change the stereotype? The FSCONS 2011 keynote will address the challenges of inclusion of broader public to the hacktivist and Free Software community and will aim at providing tools for fighting the social imbalance in the community.

In addition, this presentation will aim at providing ideas on convergences of the hacker movement with other activist movements in search for social justice. What important dimension would hacktivism add to global social movements’ justice actions? What social and cultural dimension would an intersectional approach of hacking add to the Free Software development as a policy and practice?