We were very happy to organize OFFDEM in Brussels last week-end, the reasons that originally motivated its organization became even more explicit as the week-end passed and people were coming from ULB saying they were overwhelmed by surveillance capitalist advertisement, and talks led by the same people.
Although we do bring forward the necessity to do a meeting in good conditions; private space was available along with food creativity and drinks, we propose to take our time to meet eachother. How ever, the aim of OFFDEM is not to be a chill-out place, but to offer a space where we organize out from the surveillance capitalism control, and for this we need more support from all of you, we already got great support from important groups, TOR people, Edri, activity pub (social hub community), etc…
We have welcomed a number of you, but still we need more commitments from developers to join and organize meet up out from the existing propositions.
It feels like many of us are aware that if we leave our societies in the hands of surveillance capitalism centralized in a few companies, we will not be able to uphold democratic processes anymore. But it seems like the ones who are working in the sector are not yet committed to organize elsewhere, then in places sponsored and by surveillance capitalist society. We will continue to provide work and space to do so.
We do not know if we will have the possibility to organize such an event every year, but we will try, and it will be easier with the help of all of you.
We are in the process of writing an open letter and welcome participation, this will be communicated here, we welcome suggestion and participation to its writing.
