Free Software Foundation president Richard Stallman (RMS) was in Sacramento, California, on November 15^th, as a guest of the Child Welfare Digital Services, which is a California-government project whose mission is to “fundamentally change the way state government develops software by leveraging free (libre) software, agile methodologies, and user centered design.” Their further goals are to “research, design, develop and operate a solution that is compatible with the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL), and is thus available to be copied and used as a public good by other government agencies and the public at large.”

RMS spoke to an audience of software developers (from Ruby on Rails, Java, PostgreSQL, and others), state-government IT staff, and business managers.

(Copyright © 2017 Bill Maile. Photos licensed under CC BY 4.0.)

Later in the month, he was in Innsbruck, Austria, for a lecture series on "Challenges to learning and education in the media age" (Herausforderungen für Lernen und Bildung im Medienzeitalter), at the University of Innsbruck. He gave his speech “Education, software freedom, and privacy,”¹ to explain the new ways in which our computing and political freedom are being threatened to an audience of 200–300.

(Copyright © 2017 Simon Haller. Photos licensed under CC BY 4.0.)

The next day, on December 1^st, still in Innsbruck, during the lecture series “Communicating with robots: Talking robots and social bots in discourse” ("Mit Computern kommunizieren: Gesprächsroboter und Social Bots im Diskurs"), he participated in the panel “Education 4.0? - Between learning bots and users' freedom, is digital inclusion desirable?”¹ with Nelson Gonçalves (Portugal), Martin Bauer (Vienna), and Andrea Hemetsberger (UIBK) before an audience of over 150 people.

(Copyright © 2017 Simon Haller. Photos licensed under CC BY 4.0.)

Thank you to everyone who made this trip possible!

Please fill out our contact form, so that we can inform you about future events in and around Sacramento and Innsbruck.

Please see www.fsf.org/events for a full list of all of RMS's confirmed engagements, and contact rms-assist@gnu.org if you'd like him to come speak.

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^{1. The recording will soon be posted on our audio-video archive.↩}