Daring to dream: Reclaiming our connections and building our resilience
This essay is, above all, a problem structuring exercise. It's a demonstration of how one may reconcile their worldview of a problematic situation with the worldview of others; a showcase of how our perception and understanding of problematic situations evolve as we gather more information about it; and a testment to the forces and will capable of driving change.
I had the honor to be selected as one of the keynote speakers of FOSDEM 2024 — my very first FOSDEM — alongside three of my wonderful fellow Outreachy organizers. We were stoked to meet Omotola Omotayo in person for the first time after years of virtual collaboration. We were proud to celebrate, once more, Outreachy’s history and our 1,000 interns milestone. And I, in particular, marveled at the prospect of attending a conference with such a legendary status in the collective imagination — that one place where so many of the brilliant minds behind the software freedom movement convened. There's something incredibly special about that kind of recognition when ten years prior you couldn't even conceptualize becoming a builder of that community.
I must admit, however, that a lingering and increasing sense of dread accompanied me in my journey to Brussels. Several friends and colleagues had warned me that FOSDEM is a notoriously crowded conference; some of them noted they were skeptical about their crowd control and fire safety capabilities, and a lot of them had given up on attending editions taking place after the height of the pandemic isolation period due to a lack of a satisfactory health and safety policy.
COVID-19 and other respiratory illnesses were indeed acknowledged in the opening address, but in a unconcerned, matter-of-fact manner. A specific portion of their speech caught my attention and haunts me to this day:
"For the first timers and for those who might not have been here so often, FOSDEM, Oktoberfest, those are mass spreader events. Statistically [speaking], a significant amount of people will come home sick. Done. Plain statistics and science. You can get sick if you want to, but maybe don't." — Richard "RichiH" Hartmann in Welcome to FOSDEM 2024 (13:32 to 13:54)
FOSDEM 2024 was lively — so lively I couldn't help but notice how constrained it felt under the roof of ULB. The warm sound of human voices was quickly transformed into a cacophony; the very tight space tolerances in crowded corridors forced me to adopt a more defensive stance with my white cane and to fully rely on a human guide. Our Birds of a Feather session was placed in a room that was very difficult to find even with a map, and was only accessible by stairs (AW 1.121); my attempts at talking to the kind and patient people in booths became increasingly frustrating as those areas became overwhelmed by the crowd. In a way, I couldn't help but think that it all felt... too rough for such an important and long-running conference in Europe. To me, acknowledging FOSDEM as the biggest free software conference in the world comes with the implication of responsibilities and expectations of the same scale; if the software freedom community elected FOSDEM as that one conference everyone should attend, its design should be the best in class.
An aside #
Before we continue, I want to acknowledge that my worldview comprises the perspective of someone who's a frequent conference attendee. I've attended a good amount of conferences in my lifetime — my story of involvement with the software freedom movement started at FLISoL Goiânia 2014. The majority of them were organized in public universities and institutes; some of them took place in convention centers, private higher education faculties, massive private parking lots[1], or public administration buildings. And to be frank, very few of them offered me an experience that made me want to attend them once more.
I understand that organizing a conference can be a thankless job; while I've never organized an event of the scale of FOSDEM, I've volunteered a couple of times as a room wrangler, I had a hand at organizing smaller in-person and virtual meetings, and I organize an internship program that receives tens of thousands of applications every year. Interactions with other people can become very taxing very fast, and some constraints force you to make decisions that even you may hate.
I want to make it clear that my criticism of FOSDEM comes from a place of deep compassion and care. If I didn't care so much for the community we're all part of, I would've moved on without looking back.
What we witness at FOSDEM are symptoms #
When I published a thread on the fediverse talking about the struggles I faced at FOSDEM 2024, a couple of FOSDEM volunteers approached me with questions about my white cane and nav.fosdem.org, their interactive navigation map for ULB. While their questions were pertinent and I could sense very clearly that they were eager to learn more about my particular challenges as a blind person, I felt like they missed the most important point of my speech: the problems I've faced are symptoms of bigger, more complex problematic situations. They were not seeing the forest for the trees.
This is nothing new; I've spent almost every waking moment of my life in the last 10 years addressing and managing that very fundamentally human problem. It has a violent cascading effect in different levels of scale and contexts, and it feels never-ending. I hate to be the person who's always talking about systems thinking and practice, but this is very much the subject matter of my domain of problem solving:
“In dealing with a problematic situation, a decision maker must develop a concept—a representation or a model—of it. He attempts to solve the problem as he conceives it. Thus if his conception is wrong, the solution to the problem as conceived may not solve the problem as it exists. A common example is a formulation of the problem that leads to the suppression of symptoms rather than the removal of the cause of a deficiency that creates the problem. Because of such errors of conceptualization, it has often been observed that we more frequently fail to face the right problem than fail to solve the problem we face.” — Russell L. Ackoff in The Art of Problem Solving
Let's throw our hubris out the window and ask ourselves: what are we missing? What worldviews are we failing to acknowledge and reconcile? Keep digging deeper.
To give you an example of the evolution of problem formulation in the context of FOSDEM, here are a couple of symptoms spotted by the software freedom community:
- In 2025, FOSDEM organizers accepted a questionable keynote with Jack Dorsey, raising concerns about sponsor buy-in;
- For many years, FOSDEM has been overcrowded — it's difficult to move from a devroom to another, to interact with other attendees, or to get yourself some food;
- FOSDEM organizers consider the conference a "mass spreader" event; prophylaxis has an emphasis on individual protection measures.
The public questioning of Jack Dorsey's keynote selection led to the discussion of how keynotes are selected and approved and, later on, how FOSDEM itself is structured and organized. The mention of fire safety and crowd control measures in their response to a planned protest intensified the discussion of circulation problems at ULB, raising questions about whether the organization has been stretching the venue's capacity beyond its limits and the overemphasis in one central conference (in Europe during winter) for the reunion of all software freedom advocates. Their "FOSDEM flu" stance reflects a not exclusive and widely adopted "let it rip" policy in dealing with disease, and a general attitude of returning to a normalcy that's so uncompassionate that condemns the most vulnerable to isolation.
These compounding factors result in a perception of great distance and disconnect from the responsibility of care for the community they bring together. I won’t claim that carries a malicious intent; what I’m saying is, any intent takes a backseat when these are the material consequences of a chain of decisions.
I don't want to claim that I am a perfect human who’s making absolute perfect decisions; I know I am fallible in the most haunting ways. I made many mistakes today, I’ll keep making a lot more tomorrow, and that applies to absolutely everyone. But what matters — what truly matters — is what we do after we’re told or we realize we've been making several mistakes.
What I want us all to do is to confront the imperfections of our own beings, the vulnerability that comes with the realization you can fail horrendously even when you strive for success and you do the best you can. I want us to use that as fuel to drive us forward. We need to recognize the profound effect of our actions and change. We need to understand that our best may not be enough, that we need to find path for further growth, and we should pursue it.
Daydreamed design #
Trying to tune out of the suffocating cacophony surrounding me, I follow a glimpse of another world — a daydream. How would things be if even the smallest of the discomforts went away? While studying soft operational research and strategic planning methodologies, I recently learned that's something called interactive planning:
"Interactive planners reject the approaches of the other three planners [reactive, inactive, and preactive planners]. They plan backward from where they want to be to where they are now. They plan not for the future but for what they want their organizations to be at the present time. In so doing, however, interactive managers prepare their organizations for success in the unknowable future." — Russell L. Ackoff, Jason Magidson, and Herbert J. Addison in Idealized design: how to dissolve tomorrow’s crisis... today[2]
If an idealized design approach provokes us to think creatively without the distraction of what we think is impossible, I propose daydreamed design as an invitation for us all to pursue (and keep pursuing) what we yearn for the most in those moments we're almost drowning in noise. Where are we escaping to, and how do we transform this imaginary world into reality?
There's a very detailed methodology and whole fields of study behind that idea, but I won't go into details about them here because I honestly find it irrelevant for the message I want to bring to you now: failing to face the right problems may result in the most mediocre reality because that’s been fueled by the most unimaginative dreams. We've been talking so much about how we can improve parts of FOSDEM that I can't help but ask: what are we doing to address the bigger picture? FOSDEM is part of a system of ways we connect with each other. How much of our perceived disconnect with the conference stems from deeper issues with the established ways of connection — in person, in a Global North country with a perspective centered in the Global North, in a season with heightened health risks, incurring significant costs?
Don’t get me wrong — I deeply value the opportunity to meet, in person, all the people I’ve collaborated with for years. There’s something very special about finally getting to hear their voices without the distortion or delay that comes with video calls, to experience things together in cities I’d never dreamed of visiting because I never thought I’d have a chance to do so. What I’m saying is, we shouldn’t have FOSDEM as the only important conference or the only significant way we can cross paths and find each other.
But please don't tell me that addressing, fixing, or mitigating problematic situations we've all been discussing is too difficult, or that they aren't problematic at all because "others do it the same way" or "that's the way it's always been done". There was a time that the very concept of software freedom and the scale of collaboration we're all involved in sounded like science fiction. We need you to bring in and expand the energy you invest into building libre ecosystems to efforts of liberation from whole systems. We need you to free your mind from your ideas of what seems impossible, and we need to decentralize.
I am responsible for searching for answers to similarly existential questions for Outreachy as we face tremendous uncertainty — and that's one of the reasons why Russell L. Ackoff's lessons are so relevant to us. Outreachy was directly inspired by Google Summer of Code, and it was shaped by an observation of a symptom and selected strategies to address it. Many other programs organized by the most incredible people have iterated on that format, and that format that brings in the pressure of a lot of expectations from all levels of participants and supporters. But I have the obligation to dream bigger, dream better, dream beyond my wildest dreams; and I need to have the humility necessary to recognize there will always be a better future to strive for. We shouldn't use that as an excuse to shield ourselves from the responsibility of improvement, or to argue that "nothing will ever be enough"; we should appreciate it as an unlimited source of inspiration — an opportunity to practice unfettered creativity[3], even (and, perhaps, most importantly) in the face of great challenge.
“I'm wearing dark glasses today because I'm seeing the future and it's looking very bright.” — David Lynch
This is my contribution to FluConf 2025. Special thanks to Esther Payne for encouraging me to expand my thoughts into an essay to be paired with Freeze-but-fight and Ode to free software. I recommend reading her essay The Cobbles: Mirror Mirror — that one, too, makes a great pairing with mine!
Footnotes #
Campus Party Goiás has taken place in a shopping mall parking lot (that was built on a foundation of its own set of environmental problems and violations). Yes, their acoustics were terrible — the sound of every stage and attraction made it very difficult for attendees to hear what speakers had to say. ↩︎
As you may have noticed, I’ve been reading a lot of Ackoff’s works. Besides his close relationship with Stafford Beer — another author I admire —, I have particular interest in the operations research divide in the United States. Feel free to send other cool recommendations of “soft” operational research authors my way, though! ↩︎
One aspect of Ackoff’s works that I've been finding particularly intriguing and exciting is his emphasis on creativity. I find that to be a breath of fresh air when so much of my Bachelor’s degree was focused on “hard” operational research! It’s such a shame I’m not required to write a thesis anymore. ↩︎