The most common reaction I received from friends and family in the United States is surprise and curiosity. Admittedly Tiranë is not a typical place for an American to end up. But I am no stranger to this city. I have a long history in Tiranë. I fell in love with the culture and the people, and made good friends that are still in my life today. Some even helped me relocate. (Thank you!) So while it may be unusual for an American to end up in Albania, it is not unusual for me to end up here.

But how did I make the jump? Or why leave the United States, especially while the world holds its collective breath amid a global pandemic? It was not an easy decision, so it will not have an easy explanation.

A visit to Tiranë in June. 🔗

In June 2021, I visited Tiranë with friends who had never visited Albania before. In the course of that trip, I did not realize I was being pulled back into a culture, city, and country that has stuck with me for many years. But I was.

Fate took my hand, and after a year of cloudy uncertainty, I knew a new part of my destiny. On a fateful flight flying westbound, my heart was resolved to return eastbound. And how hard must I bite my tongue to acknowledge this privilege bestowed unto me by my American passport? To leave the story unfinished was only a matter of resolve, thus I knew I must pursue the next chapter.

Fast forward… and I am here in Tiranë. I made my arrival quietly to give me time to settle. (Literally.) I only had a bed, fridge, microwave, and a sofa. Now it is feeling more like my home. I am eager to make rounds to my favorite places and saying përshëndetje to old friends again soon.

Is the future in Stockholm? 🇸🇪 🔗

Part of my move is also motivated by my work team’s upcoming relocation. My team will relocate to Stockholm, Sweden over the next year. I am not sure where my fate will leave me. I love what I do and I feel privileged to be paid for it. So if I will continue forward on this same path, then I know I will go.

Yet I prefer to know by experience than to guess by speculation. So if I will go with my team, I would like to experience first-hand what would be my new home. Another fact is that plane tickets to Europe are cheaper from Europe. Cheaper than from the United States, even though Tiranë is a “premium” destination by European standards.

Eventually I hope to visit my new office and see it for myself. Again wondering how hard to bite my tongue if I acknowledge the unique privilege I have to casually shift my life in such a seismic way.

Here, for now. 🔗

If you are a friend and happen to be in Tiranë, drop me a note!

If you’re outside of the Mediterranean region, the Open Labs Hackerspace might be one of the hidden secrets of the region that you never knew existed. Free software and open principles build the community’s foundation. In their hackerspace, they support various open source projects with time, energy, and activism. Members work on various open source projects, ranging from Fedora, Mozilla, Nextcloud, Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, and more. But the open source way goes beyond the software. The hierarchy of this Albanian non-profit organization is flat and open too. The hackerspace places a strong emphasis on empowering others to have a voice and to take part in the governance. No question is ever dumb, and anyone who wants to learn is able to find someone who will help guide them in the right direction. The combined effect of open software and open culture has helped Open Labs grow over the past five years.

Why Open Labs? 🔗

There are many hackerspaces in the world, but why does Open Labs mean so much to me? They love free and open source software and believe in the open source way… sure. That’s definitely part of it. But beyond the mission, beyond the activities, Open Labs fosters an inclusive and empowering culture. This culture has the effective of motivating others to understand that their voice matters and that they can have an impact on something far bigger than themselves. The hackerspace helps give young people in Tirana a platform to stand up and share their ideas. But beyond that, it provides them with the resources and community to help turn the ideas into reality.

So, what is the secret? Simply… the people.

Everything that the community here does, they take their unique passion and energy into those tasks. They invest their own personal resources into building solutions to answer complicated problems, inside and outside of Albania. Some of their work is best demonstrated in events that happened earlier this year. In March, Open Labs helped coordinate the first-ever 48 hour hackathon for United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Later in March, they organized Linux Weekend, an introductory event to help introduce Linux to students. This was done by demonstrating what can be done with Linux and open source and then connecting students to professionals from Tirana and abroad. The organic energy that came from these events is almost immeasurable. Even an event report is hard to convey how inspiring that energy was.

This past weekend, from May 13-14, 2017, the community organized the fourth edition of the annual Open Source Conference Albania (OSCAL) in Tirana. This is the largest open source event in Albania and one of the most notable in southeast Europe. No event report for this yet, but you can expect one soon.

Why part of my heart is at Open Labs 🔗

Whenever I visit Albania and visit Open Labs, I learn something new. There’s many different types of things I learn. Sometimes it’s something about an open source project or community. Other times, I learn about events and opportunities happening in the local Tirana area for open source. And then other times, I gain unique insight towards some of the unique challenges and problems that citizens face here. Every time I visit, my perspective is always broadened in a way that I wouldn’t be able to normally find. It’s exhilarating.

I am privileged and honored to be an official member of this community. However, I am mostly an observer in my role. The passion and interest are at the heart of the hackerspace. The members from Tirana have invested so much of themselves into this community, its mission, and its values. From reading, visiting, and talking with the people involved with Open Labs, you see many of their hearts dedicated to what they’re doing. And when you see someone else who invests their heart into something, it’s challenging to not lend some of your own too.

And in today’s world, where the hearts of many people close with borders and the world shifts towards coldness, the warmth that radiates from Open Labs is refreshing, inspiring, and powerful.

Discover Open Labs 🔗

You can learn more about the Open Labs Hackerspace on their website. Additionally, you can also follow them along on Facebook and Twitter to see what they’re up to. You can also see their Discourse forums to say hello and take part in any discussion too.

Open source projects are built online and a lot of their community members are placed all over the world. Even though projects have people from around the world, this doesn’t stop ambitious community members to organize open source conferences or events in their own cities. Whether they’re focused generally to open source or for a specific project, you can find a variety of conferences, hackathons, workshops, or meet-ups all over the world. Fedora benefits from having Ambassadors to attend these events to introduce Fedora and spread the word about the community. It’s not uncommon to see Fedora participating in these events, and Linux Weekend 2017 in Tirana, Albania was not an exception.

From March 25-26, 2017 in Tirana, Albania, nearly 130 people attended the first-ever Linux Weekend 2017. Linux Weekend was organized by Open Labs Hackerspace at the Universiteti Politeknik i Tiranës as an introduction to Linux for beginners. Throughout Tirana, universities have a strong focus on Windows or macOS operating systems and little focus is given to Linux. Open Labs community members wanted to organize an event that would promote Linux as an open source alternative and demonstrate some of its benefits over proprietary environments. The event collected representatives from various communities, including Fedora, Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, NextCloud, MusicBrainz, and more.

Organizing Linux Weekend 🔗

The Open Labs community is not unfamiliar to organizing open source events in Tirana. Their portfolio includes Fedora release parties, OpenStreetMap map-a-thons, Wikipedia edit-a-thons, and Fedora community meet-ups. However, these events have been targeted towards people who already had prior interest or knowledge about open source communities. The organization and planning for Linux Weekend began in the middle of January as an idea to introduce Linux to complete beginners.

Planning and organizing Linux Weekend was a community effort. Jona Azizaj is a board member of Open Labs and a Fedora contributor, and was involved as an organizer for the event. “This was the first edition of Linux Weekend, so the main focus is to raise awareness about Linux and open source. We wanted to educate beginners and spread the word about the choices that are available,” Azizaj explained. The two tracks for the event were full of talks and workshops to introduce attendees not only to Linux, but also various software and applications of what someone can do with Linux.

Many of the attendees were students who had either heard of Linux in their classes or from their peers. Other attendees included industry professionals or other open source community members. Several representatives of Fedora from different parts of the community were in attendance as well. Ambassadors, designers, and translators were available to answer questions and teach newcomers about Fedora.

Albanian students learn Linux 🔗

Since the focus of the event was to teach newcomers about Linux and how it can be used, Linux Weekend was organized to be an introduction to various parts of the Linux ecosystem. Representatives from Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch Linux, OpenSUSE, Linux Mint, and elementaryOS gave introductions to the operating systems and their communities. In addition to distributions, there were also sessions on open source licenses, NextCloud, text editors, MusicBrainz, and more. The benefit of these sessions were demonstrating the different ways Linux can be used to accomplish various tasks.

In addition to the various sessions during the weekend, there were three community booths for Fedora, OpenSUSE, and Mozilla. Attendees had a chance to get swag from each project and also talk with representatives about their own experiences or how to get started using their project.

Sidorela Uku was both an attendee and a speaker at Linux Weekend. Her talk, “Programming in Linux, editors, and tools”, introduced various text editors and other tools to help customize any Linux distribution to someone’s needs or personal preferences. In addition to sharing her own knowledge, she was also excited to discover new things. “I wanted to attend the talks and workshops to learn as much as possible. I also wanted to figure out the next steps to find a project and get involved as a contributor,” Uku explained. “I also wanted to share the things I know with others to help them get started with Linux.” This was Uku’s first time speaking at an event and she looks forward to more open source events in Tirana in the future.

Fedora contributors introduce community 🔗

Various members of the Fedora community were also in attendance. Some of the Fedora presentations over the weekend introduced the project to newcomers, detailed the translation efforts to bring Fedora to Albanian, and also guided attendees on how to make their first steps as contributors. The Fedora presence aimed to help give newcomers a taste of the operating system but also to show the impact someone can have if they decide to contribute.

Mariana Balla was one of the first speakers on Saturday morning with her talk titled, “Introduction to Fedora Project and how to be a part of the community”. She started with localizing Fedora into Albanian in early 2016 and more recently started to become an advocate as well. “Fedora is one of the most used distributions, and it was great to have Fedora here to spread the word and show what our community is all about,” Balla said. “One thing I hoped to show in my talk was that technical skills aren’t required to contribute to Fedora. There’s so many things that aren’t code that people can help with!” One of the highlights of Balla’s presentation was breaking down the different sub-projects in the community and how they contribute to making Fedora what it is. One site that was mentioned was whatcanidoforfedora.org, a site anyone can click their way through to find an area that interests them.

One key contribution area that was important for the local community was localization. Many attendees and speakers alike thought it was important to have software translated into their native language. Anxhela Hyseni is a Fedora Ambassador and led the workshop on “Translation of Fedora”. “It’s important for Albanians to have software in Albanian because we are Albanians!” Hyseni laughs. “People are better able to understand Fedora and it makes it more accessible for us to have it in our local language.” She hopes that attendees left Linux Weekend with plenty of new contacts in the open source community and a better idea of what Linux is all about. She and others also helped Linux newcomers install Fedora 25 as a dual-boot or for virtual machines in the installfest on Saturday morning.

Wrapping up 🔗

After two days of talks, workshops, and hallway discussions, the final talk finished around 4:00pm on Sunday. Azizaj closed out with some final words of encouragement and thanks for attendee participation.

The presence of Fedora, open source software, and its philosophy was present during the entire weekend. Between stickers, install media, and brochures from community tables and the various presentations during the weekend, participants and organizers felt the event was worthwhile. “We had limited time to plan, but it was important to bring Linux to people to introduce the philosophy, show them how to use it, and also how they can give back,” Anxhelo Lushka, an event organizer and Fedora contributor, explained. “We hope attendees had new experiences and learned something new and useful for the real world, for jobs or studying. We also hope we convinced them to contribute and give back, even if in a small way.”

Now that Linux Weekend 2017 is finished, the organizing team is switching their focus to Open Source Conference Albania (OSCAL), the largest open source conference in the region.

Find Fedora near you 🔗

Open source events are happening all around the world, and Fedora might be closer to you than you think! Check for local user or meet-up groups near you to get involved in some of these events. Meetup.com is a great way to find local events happening in your community. You can also keep an eye on what Fedora is up to by following us on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or Instagram.

We hope to see you at an event in the coming future!

The local hackerspace in Tirana, Albania might be small, but they make up for size in spirit. During the weekend of 18-19 March 2017, the Open Labs Hackerspace organized the first-ever 48 hour “open source” hackathon focused on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. The UN Sustainable Development Goals are seventeen objectives identified by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) to build a better world, starting in our own communities. Some of the goals include quality education, gender equality, decent work and economic growth, clean energy, and more. During the course of the hackathon, participants selected a goal, broke into teams, and worked on projects to make real change in their own neighborhoods. In the spirit of open source, all projects are made available under free and open licenses.

Organizing the hackathon in Albania 🔗

The board members of Open Labs oversee most of its operations and help guide members in hosting events and keeping the hackerspace busy. The current board members are Redon Skikuli, Jona Azizaj, Elio Qoshi, Kristi Progri, and Anisa Kuci. However, they emphasize that it’s strongly a community-based organization. Board members invite others to take part in the organization’s governance.

Open Labs board members. Pictured left to right: Jona Azizaj, Anisa
Kuci, Kristi Progri, Redon Skikuli, Elio Qoshi. (Justin Wheeler, CC-BY-SA 4.0)

When the opportunity came to take part in this event, the board members felt it was a great opportunity to try something new. While hackathon events are popular and well-known in the United States and elsewhere, this was foreign territory for the community. “At first, we were nervous because this type of 48 hour event was new for Open Labs but also for Albania. But we wanted to use this as a chance to introduce the open source philosophy to new people and to show what we do and why,” said Azizaj. The organizers hoped to appeal to a wider audience than only active community members too.

The visiting representative from the United Nations meets participants
and helps work with them on brainstorming ideas. © Eduard Pagria, used with permission

Organizing the hackathon was a challenge since many of the core team members were traveling the week before the event. However, community members and UN representatives were more than willing to help with organizing the hackathon. This event also required a level of coordination that was uncommon for the normal type of event organized in Open Labs. “When planning, we were hoping to reach out to non-members of Open Labs too. This way, more people are exposed to open source and its culture. This lets people who want to make change, but don’t know how, to understand what is available to help them,” said Skikuli. When the Friday before the event arrived, the team was ready for a weekend of open source, civic hacking.

On Saturday morning, approximately 30 people were present for the event kick-off. Open Labs members and United Nations representatives introduced the hackathon and the themes for attendees to focus on during the weekend. Attendees were a diverse group of people as well: there was a balance between technical and non-technical people, and the gender ratio was almost evenly split between males and females.

Working on projects 🔗

One participant, Edlina, worked with Augest to develop an application
that creates a feedback loop with students and teachers to NGOs and
governments to understand problems in schools and find ways to work
together without duplicating work. © Eduard Pagria, used with permission

The Open Labs organizers placed emphasis in networking between participants at the beginning. The event started with introductions and each participant made a note of whether they were a technical or non-technical contributor. After this, they wrote their names on sticky notes along with their preferred goals to stick on the wall. Participants were paired up with someone with a different background but with a mutual interest in a specific goal. “We separated participants into two groups: technical and non-technical. Our idea was the two sides would complement each other to share experiences to build a strong team,” said Azizaj. After the teams were formed, they began brainstorming and working on their projects. Mentors were available to offer support to participants and to introduce them to open source tools to help them prototype their projects.

World of Sounds 🔗

Silva Arapi, one participant, worked with her team on their project
“World of Sounds”. (Justin Wheeler, CC-BY-SA 4.0)

One participant, Silva Arapi, worked with teammates Dritan Sakuta, Hulemita Leka, Kristi Leka, and Klajdi Qehaja to address reduced inequalities. Their team project is called “World of Sounds”.  The application is a resource for parents of children with hearing or speaking disabilities. “World of Sounds is a platform to understand early on to improve education of parents and accessibility for children. This is very helpful for rural parts [of Albania],” Arapi explained.

She has been involved with the Open Labs community for almost a year and a half. It was her first hackathon but she also hadn’t seen an event like this in Albania before. “It was a new experience and something different. We get something done in 48 hours to have a social impact – why not participate?” Arapi balances her time leading the NextCloud efforts in Tirana while working towards her master’s degree in Information Security. She hopes to take part in another event at Open Labs like this again in the future.

Tackling gender equality in Albania 🔗

Another Open Labs community member came with an idea and a friend to try thinking through a specific issue she had seen in her community. Nafie Shehu is an Information Communication Technology student and has been involved with Open Labs for the past seven months. With her, she brought her friend Afrim Kamberi to help, for his first visit to Open Labs and an open source event in Tirana.

Shehu’s selected goal was gender equality combined with an experience of one of her friends. In some rural areas and villages in Albania, women have a more difficult time maintaining their rights. They rarely have financial independence, and as a result, this sometimes leads them to live a life they might not want. Sometimes, women are obligated into a non-consensual marriage and aren’t in a place to defend what they want for themselves. Her friend was in this situation and divorced later, but she didn’t know where to go after and had little resources of her own. Nafie heard about this story and it deeply affected her. She hoped to brainstorm ideas on how to improve this problem.

After research and looking at other solutions, she discovered similar attempts had been started to solve this problems. However, for various reasons, they were ineffective and weren’t thorough solutions to the problems. While this changed her own project development, she finished the hackathon determined to find ways to improve on what was already there and continue this even after the weekend ended.

Closing the hackathon 🔗

Towards the end of Sunday, participants put the last touches onto their projects. The deliverable product was prepared and all participants organized a short presentation to demo their project. “In the end, you get a real product, not just talking. It’s a real product that has an impact,” Progri explained. All of the various teams pitched their projects to the Open Labs community and to representatives from the United Nations.

Anxhelo Lushka helps two participants after midnight to help work
through some problems in their project. (Justin Wheeler, CC-BY-SA 4.0)

In the project presentations, teams were given specific criteria to present in the project.

1. Summary or main idea of the project
2. Sustainability of the project for implementation beyond the weekend
3. Recommendations for funding the project / creating a budget to carry it out
4. Reasons why they would support this if it wasn’t their own project

After the presentations, teams were given the option to send their information and projects to the UNDP via Open Labs. The UNDP will select one project and team to bring to the United Nations office in New York City to propose their project and seek support to develop it further.

That’s a wrap! 🔗

After a closing ceremonies and words of encouragement from Skikuli, the hackathon came to an end. Both participants and organizers felt it ended on a high note. “I love coming to these events to learn new things, meet new people, and they’re cool!” Arapi said. Additionally, the organizers hoped that participants left with valuable knowledge and resources that would go beyond this weekend. “We hope people understand the role open source had in this event and understand why the philosophy is so important,” Qoshi explained. “Some people might think the projects are the main part, but networking with people from different backgrounds goes beyond the event. These connections support sustainability for people working together. We hope these projects continue beyond this event.”

The presence of open source software and its philosophy was present throughout the event. Stickers and swag from various open source projects was available for participants to take. This included stickers from Mozilla, Fedora, LibreOffice, NextCloud, and more. “We hope attendees enjoyed the experience and had fun meeting new people. Later on, when they leave Open Labs and work on their own projects, we hope they will remember open source tools to build their work and create FOSS solutions,” said Azizaj.

What’s next for Open Labs? 🔗

This was a milestone event for the Open Labs community, but they have more on the horizon after the weekend of this event. Organizers, volunteers, and members are putting together the first Linux Weekend in Tirana from 25-26 March. This is a traditional barcamp-like model with talks and workshops by several local and international speakers. However, there are a couple of goals ahead that the team hopes to begin working at.

One of them is a book in time for the hackerspace’s fifth anniversary. The book would be an “open source handbook” in the Albanian language. Not only would it have the history of Open Labs, but it would introduce various open source projects and connect readers to resources so they could have an impact on a project. Additionally, the team is looking at policy in their government as a next step. Qoshi had a great deal to say on this: “It feels like we’re reaching critical mass and gaining momentum to influence local policy in Albania. We want to push for open policies and government, especially with the coming elections in June. This is a great opportunity to let people know our stances on policies. Pushing FOSS only in our space can’t be an insider secret—we need conversations with people coming from different views if we want change.”

You can learn more about the hackerspace online at their website.