Our adventures at HOPE 2026

We were at the HOPE 2026 Conference in New York recently, and want to take a moment to thank all the free software supporters who attended our talks and workshops, our meetup, or stopped by our table. We are also very, very grateful to our volunteers who helped staff the Free Software Foundation (FSF) table and helped us organize our Saturday meetup as well. And we also want to congratulate the organizers, speakers, and other participants of HOPE 2026 for making it yet another successful event.

The FSF staff attending HOPE 2026 were (from left to right) Michael, Heshan, Greg, Craig, and Sean.

There were five of us from the FSF at HOPE 2026: deputy director Sean O’Brien; copyright & licensing associate Craig Topham; campaigns manager Greg Farough; GNU/Linux systems administrator Michael McMahon; and myself, the FSF’s program manager. Each of us either presented a talk or conducted a workshop. Greg and I presented a workshop on how to encrypt your email using the FSF’s Email Self-Defense Guide, a workshop which we will again offer as part of the upcoming EncryptFest. Craig led two workshops, including one on how to determine a program’s free software license. Meanwhile, Michael gave a talk on the many ways the FSF battles DDoS bots — which he has also written about previously, including in his post on how the tech team uses a tool called reaction and how they keep the Savannah infrastructure safe. Sean, together with his collaborator, Mikalai Birukou, presented a talk on routing around apps stores.

The crowd at the FSF meetup in New York City during HOPE 2026

On Saturday night, we also hosted a member meetup. In collaboration with Freedom Lab NYC (link requires nonfree JavaScript), and partly sponsored by their programs’ sponsor CAKE Wallet, we happily welcomed seventy-seven free software supporters. Lots of good conversations and connections were made over boxes of pizza that were quickly emptied of their contents!

In the weeks and months before HOPE, my colleagues were very excited about the conference. HOPE was to be my first free software gathering, so I asked them to tell me why they were excited. Most simply said that HOPE tended to be one of those spaces where free software supporters just felt at home. Within a few minutes of being there, I understood. The other people I met during HOPE and during our meetup were all warm, curious, knowledgeable, walked to the beat of their own drum, and so many of them had a deep commitment to software freedom. All of this I found genuinely inspiring. And those I met who didn’t yet know about the FSF’s work simply got it when I spoke to them about freedom in computing. In fact, many were eager to learn about how they too may contribute to user freedom. It was a very absorbing weekend for me because of the conversations I had, the talks I attended, and the many things I learned. It was also a delight to spend time with my colleagues. The FSF is a virtual office, so it was super fun to be in the physical company of some of the folks I talk to everyday usually only over Mumble, Galene, and Gajim, which is my chosen client for XMPP.

Thanks again to our volunteers, to everyone who visited our table, attended our talks and workshops, and packed our meetup. We were very happy to meet you all, many of you for the first time. And a special thanks to all of you who donated, supported our work by buying our swag, or became brand new associate members! We’re so glad we got to spend HOPE 2026 with so many of you.

• « FSF staff at HOPE 2026 » © 2026 by Heshan de Silva-Weeramuni. This photo is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.
• « FSF member meetup during HOPE 2026 in New York City » © 2026 by Sean O’Brien seano@fsf.org and distributed under Creative Commons Attribution – ShareAlike 4.0 International license