On Saturday 26 September, Hackerspace Brussels hosts its yearly edition of Software Freedom Day. Doors open at 11:30, the talks run from 13:00 until 19:00, and entry is free. The theme this year is “Organising with FOSS”. Because the topic hits home, it makes sense for us to help out and have a corner of our own during this event.
Full programme and directions: sfd.hsbxl.be
# What BeLibre is doing there
Jurgen and Christopher open the talks at 13:00 with an introduction to BeLibre and to the Leak Inspector scans of municipal, school and healthcare websites. The talk covers how to run a scan, how to read the report that comes out of it, and how to bring the findings to a local council in a way that they can work with it.
Next to that, we will have a table for the whole day. That is where most of the useful conversations happen. People wander over between talks, ask what we actually do, and some of them might turn out to run the IT for a school or sit on a municipal council.
# What we are asking
We would like the table staffed from 13:00 until 19:00, with two people on it at any moment. That comes down to three shifts of two hours, and six volunteers in total.
The shifts:
- 13:00 to 15:00
- 15:00 to 17:00
- 17:00 to 19:00
Two hours is the default. If you can only free yourself for an hour, tell us which half of the shift you prefer and we will find someone for the other half.
If a talk you want to see falls inside your shift, say so and we will look to shuffle things around. Nobody should be standing at a table while missing that one talk they came for.
# What a shift involves
The table is set up as a mythbusters game. We put a statement in front of whoever walks past, from one of the three stacks: privacy, digital sovereignty or security, and ask them to call it true or false. Then you turn the card over and tell them why.
Two examples of the kind of thing on the cards:
- “Data stored in a European datacentre is out of reach of American authorities.”
- “Open source software is less secure, because anybody can read the code.”
The answers are on the back of the cards, with two or three sentences of explanation and the source behind them. So your job is to hand someone a statement, listen to their guess, and read them the other side. Most visitors stay to argue about it, and that argument is the entire point of this setup.
We also bring blank cards in the three colours, so visitors can add a claim of their own to whichever stack it belongs in. They can serve as a clear claim, or as an invitation for BeLibre to dig into this.
Along the way we invite people to join BeLibre. Membership goes through a card they buy at the table, and we ask for an e-mail address to go with it. Anyone who wants to stay under a handle of their own choosing becomes a supporting member. Anyone who gives their real name and fills in the application form becomes a legal member, with voting rights at the general assembly. We ask for nothing beyond what each of those two options needs.
# You don’t need to be technical
So this event is going on in the hackerspace. Doesn’t this mean that everyone there will be an expert in all that technical stuff and know things way better than I do? Won’t I make a fool of myself? The important part is that you’re willing to think about it from different angles. And the technical one is only one facet of the story. There’s also the impact on society, the legal part, and just the part about you being a citizen who believes things can change if we speak up and inform policy makers and where needed the population.
If someone at the table asks a technical question, the correct answer is “I don’t know that, but let me find Christopher, Jurgen or one of the other more technical people for you. Maybe they’ll know more”.
We send everyone who signs up the full set of cards a few days in advance, along with a page on what BeLibre does and the questions that come up most often. Reading through it takes ten minutes.
Dutch, French and English speakers are all welcome, and a mix is better than any single one. The audience in Brussels switches language mid-sentence.
# The rest of the day
The programme is broader than the hackerspace setting suggests. Kai gives an introduction to OpenStreetMap and how to start mapping your own neighbourhood. Luna uses Framasoft to walk through free tools for organising, collaborating and communicating. AltF4 covers the open source software behind the Belgian eID card, which is one of the clearer examples of public money producing public code in this country. Alexander Engelhardt will talk about a custom programmable board he designed. If some talks are less in your wheelhouse, there’s the hallway where BeLibre will be standing - socialising and discussing the joy and benefits of Free software.
The talks end with a show and tell session: six slots of ten minutes for anyone who wants to demonstrate something they made. These don’t get streamed or recorded.
# Warm up with some talks from previous years
All of these were recorded and are on the HSBXL event pages. All in English, all watchable without preparation.
From the 2025 edition:
- Digital Autonomy in Belgium by Jurgen Gaeremyn. The survey of public DNS records that showed how many Belgian municipalities hand their mail to American providers. This is the most direct preview of the conversations you will be having at the table.
- Why we need Digital Sovereignty and where it comes from by Sebastian Raible. Traces the sovereignty debate back to the 2013 Snowden disclosures and to fundamental rights, rather than to industrial policy. No technical content at all.
- A Taste of Open Data: Exploring the Open Food Facts Project by April Bilbrey. A volunteer-run food database that the UN recognised as a Digital Public Good. A good reminder that “open” reaches well past software.
From the 2024 edition:
- How to apply the free software or open source definition to an AI system by Ciarán. Why AI systems don’t fit the definitions we already had, which approaches were on the table, and what follows from the choice. Listed as requiring no prior knowledge, and it holds up.
- FFglitch: when bugs become features by Ramiro Polla. What this person does, is hacking in the most artistic way. Using bugs in video rendering scripts to create the most fantastic effects on video streams. Even if you don’t understand it all, it’s a fun talk to watch.
# Practical
Hackerspace Brussels, doors at 11:30. Directions are on hsbxl.be/enter.
After the talks there is a communal meal (probably BBQ), with vegetarian and vegan options, at 15 euro per person.
If you’re a volunteer, you’re getting a discount. If you arrive early to help set the stand up, lunch is on us and there will be pizza. If you helped along and stay for the barbecue, you pay 7 euro instead of 15. Our budget stretches to one of the two per person, so if you are there from the start of the day until the end, pick whichever meal you want covered and settle the other one yourself.
There will also be a live stream of the talks whose speakers agree to it. The link will be published on the event page on the day itself. But coming over is better, it’s way harder to get in a conversation with a stream.
# Sign up
Send Jurgen a message on Matrix at @jurgen_g:matrix.org, or mail jurgen@belibre.be. Mention which block suits you and which languages you are comfortable in. You will not be at the table on your own at any point, and where the schedule allows it we put a first-timer next to someone who has done this before.