LibreItalia Conference 2025 in Gradisca d’Isonzo

Libreitalia Conference 2025 was organized by Marco Marega – a LibreItalia and TDF Member – in Gradisca d’Isonzo, near the border with Slovenia, in Gorizia’s province. Gradisca is a very nice fortified city surrounded be beautiful parks. The conference venue was the historical Monte di Pietà palace, that the municipality administration kindly allowed to use.

Gorizia, the administrative center, is a city divided in two parts, half in Italy (Gorizia itself), and half in Slovenia (Nova Gorica). Together, they are the 2025 European’s Capital of Culture.

The conference was very interesting, with members coming from many different cities. Furio Honsell – a councilman of Friuli Venezia Giulia region and also a former mayor of the city of Udine and rector of Udine University – was the special guest, introducing his regional law proposal to promote free software adoption in local administrations.

Italo Vignoli had two talks, one about the end of Windows 10 support and the other about the 20th anniversary of the ODF format. Marco Gaiarin had a brief talk about good practices for free software adoption. Giulia Bimbi spoke about Italian laws regulating free software adoption in public administrations.

Blerta Mecani and Moreno Cervesato of PNLUG, Pordenone Linux Users’ group, talked about their activities, with a special focus on their project leveraging Italian rules which permit to legally recover used PCs, install Linux on them and then donate them to schools.

Sonia Zorba and Andrej Sossi presented Trieste Linux Users group activities, and their game to learn command line.

Marco Marega opened the day introducing free software and LibreOffice to newbies.
In the afternoon, he explained – together with Gabriele Ponzo – how to contribute to the LibreOffice project, focusing on the tools used to localize the software’s UI and the documentation.

Marco did a very good job in organizing the event, and was very happy to see many community members meeting in his hometown. The conference was a great occasion to strengthen our community.

On November 22/23, some of the conference attendees will meet again in Pordenone, another administrative center of Friuli Venezia Giulia, at the Linux Arena within the Radioamatore2 fair.