GNU social is building the first decentralized free software social network licensed under the GNU Affero GPL license, built on the StatusNet software stack and the OStatus protocol.

Leading the event will be Matt Lee, project lead for GNU social, who said "These meetings give us a real opportunity to bring people who are building the best tools for the social web together, to allow our developers to glean insight from the design decisions that go into creating social protocols and applications, and to allow us to quickly move forward in the development of GNU social."

Face-to-face "hacker meets" have emerged as an important way of giving momentum to projects from documentation and code to animation and user-interface design. Meeting face-to-face is doubly important for a project designed to free social network users from control by remote corporate interests.

Evan Prodromou, founder of StatusNet, Inc and operator of the popular identi.ca social messaging website said: "We're excited that GNU social and StatusNet will be working together much more closely. Working together, we think we can make great software that implements truly distributed social networking. Everyone -- individuals, businesses, universities and non-profits -- deserve to manage their own connection to the social web without sacrificing privacy, security and control."

Working together for free software

The event comes as another in a series of events and articles from the foundation. In 2008, the FSF hosted a group around the topic of free network services, which led to the creation of the autonomo.us group, and in March, foundation president Richard Stallman published the first in a series of philosophical articles on network services — "Who does that server really serve?"