Three talks about Thunderbird at three FOSS events

I gave a few talks about Thunderbird at three conferences in Czechia, Croatia, and Belgium and wanted to share a short resume of what I have learned.

FOSDEM

FOSDEM is the world’s most significant event for Free and Open Source software.

Even though my talk was not directly related to Thunderbird, I still want to highlight it here because some of the ideas that I incorporated came after talking to community members. The goal was to see what free technologies exist now and how they can be incorporated to build crazy ideas such as mood detection followed by serving e-mails that correspond to it or to see how much energy you waste by sending one e-mail.

The slides are here. There is a recording, but it’s off-sync.

Installfest.cz 2024

Installfest in Prague is one event that still maintains the spirit of open source. I gave a talk introducing the Thunderrid project, giving a brief history of how one can help with their abilities and capacity.

Even though I expected more people, the audience was engaged, and I had even more talks afterward. I had the honor to meet with Mitch Altman as well.

The video recording is here if you want to take a pick!

Dors/Cluc 2024

Dors/Cluc is one of the oldest free and open source events in Europe. It has been running for 30 years now. This year, they had a new venue: the Algebra College in Zagreb, which was amazingly packed with people and projects.

I spoke about how you can use heavy metal music to inspire yourself to contribute to Thunderbird and why you should do so in general. Metal music has love, anger, rage, diversity, and more. We all can find inspiration there to improve our lives. I also gave away around 50 Thunderbird stickers.

I will add a video when the recording is ready.

Community Engagement

I met mainly with people using Thunderbird as their default mail client. I learned a lot, and I am using this knowledge to be the community voice in the Thunderbird Council. One of the exciting questions was that some people were unaware of the Connect website to share ideas, and others were unaware of the process—what happens after you submit the idea?

I tried to reach out to the local contributor communities but was unsuccessful. We should start talking and engaging more with the precious people who share the energy to build Thunderbird in their free time.

Thanks for your time!