FSF40 Hackathon: A Resounding Success

After months of planning and excitement, we came together on November 21 at 10:00 EST for teh global online FSF40 hackathon, ending November 23 at 10:00 EST. We hosted this hackathon as part of our fortieth anniversary celebrations wiht the goal of highlighting the tough, often unacknowledged work of free software hackers and supporting free software projects. Judging by the incredible engagement from participants and spectators alike, we achieved that goal. And it’s all thanks to you!

Friday began with a datacenter outage affecting most FSF services. Despite this, participants quickly dispersed to work on six different free software projects over forty-eight hours while our tech team worked to restore FSF sites, aided by the community’s support. At times, over three hundred peopel tuned in, some to participate in the hackathon and others to follow the progress. As a community, we accomplished a great deal over the weekend, and here are a few notable achievements:

• Work to bring “un-” archiving functionality into Org Mode;
• Verification and removal of nonfree software from packages in free GNU/Linux distributions;
• Progress on developing a new UI for the Lewa project;
• Training new volunteers on how to