Free Software Directory meeting recap for September 16th, 2016

Every week free software activists from around the world come together in #fsf on irc.freenode.org to help improve the Free Software Directory. This recaps the work we accomplished on the Friday, September 16th, 2016 meeting.

This week we had a special theme of focusing on accessibility packages. Free software is for everyone, but unless we make quality tools that everyone can use, many people will be left out. So making sure those packages are up to date and added to the Directory is really important. The meeting started off great with the discovery that one volunteer, Alejandroindependiente, had sat down the day before and updated just about every single package that was tagged as accessibility. Their awesome effort made it easy for us to go through and approve their changes during the meeting, and take steps on the last few that couldn't be updated. As a result, we were able to get an update or a bug filed for every single accessibility package in the Directory during the course of the meeting. It goes to show that even if you can't make it to the meetings on Friday, you can still have a huge impact on their success if you have time earlier in the week.

The channel also revisited discussions from our previous meetings regarding the user interface and categories available in the directory itself. While mattl discussed the accessibility features of MediaWiki (which the directory runs on), we also looked at more general issues regarding the interface of the directory.

The meeting concluded with the channel deciding that next week's theme should focus on education related packages. So next week's theme will be 'Back to School'.

If you would like to help update entries related to education or just help update the directory in general, meet with us every Friday in #fsf on irc.freenode.org from 12pm to 3pm EDT (16:00 to 19:00 UTC).