About
1. Organizational Overview & Legal Identity
Free Libre Open Source Software Kosova (FLOSSK) is a non-governmental, non-profit organization established in Prishtina, Kosovo. Founded in March 2009 at the initiative of James Michael DuPont alongside a dedicated cohort of local technology volunteers, FLOSSK was created eighteen months after Kosovo’s declaration of independence. The organization emerged to address the prohibitive costs of proprietary software licenses, overcome regional technological isolation, and build an open, collaborative ecosystem for computing and technology education. FLOSSK is registered as a non-profit association under Kosovo's Law on Freedom of Association in Non-Governmental Organizations. It operates strictly for public-interest educational, scientific, and cultural objectives, with all institutional property, income, and donations dedicated entirely to non-profit pursuits.
2. Mission, Vision, and Institutional Pillars
FLOSSK's core mission is to support, promote, and develop free and open-source software, open and participatory knowledge, information technology education through open courseware, open standards, and open culture through free communication. The organization’s foundational vision is to serve as one of the leading free and open-source software organizations in Southeast Europe. Its programmatic focus aligns with internationally recognized open principles:
- Free Software
- Championing the four essential software freedoms as defined by the Free Software Foundation (FSF).
- Open Source Software
- Advocating for community-driven peer production as articulated by the Open Source Initiative (OSI).
- Participatory Knowledge
- Promoting open educational content and collaborative encyclopedic platforms supported by the Wikimedia Foundation.
- Open Standards & Public Commons
- Advancing interoperable web standards (W3C) and permissive public licensing frameworks (Creative Commons).
3. Core Community Values
FLOSSK’s community culture and work are guided by five foundational values:
- Sharing
- Fostering a collaborative commons where code, educational materials, and technical expertise are freely distributed and collectively enriched.
- Openness
- Maintaining radical transparency in governance, data distribution, software architectures, and licensing.
- Decentralization
- Supporting distributed, peer-to-peer systems and community ownership over centralized vendor dependency.
- Free Access to Computers
- Eliminating socioeconomic barriers to ensure students, developers, and citizens have equitable access to computing infrastructure.
- World Improvement
- Advancing society through open technology, democratic participation, and the defense of fundamental digital and civic rights.
4. Physical Communal Spaces & Regional Expansion
- Prishtina Hackerspace
On July 1, 2014, FLOSSK members established the Prishtina Hackerspace, formalized through an international crowdfunding campaign in 2015. Located at Rr. Ganimete Tërbeshi 61 in the Aktash neighborhood of Prishtina, the hackerspace functions under FLOSSK’s institutional umbrella as a cooperative workshop for technology, science, and digital art. The space features electronics and microelectronics workbenches, soldering gear, digital fabrication and 3D printing equipment, woodworking tools, and an event area known as The Pub, where lightning talks take place and community craft beer is brewed. The hackerspace hosts Open Wednesdays (weekly informal meetups at 17:30) and the structured Monthly Membership Meetup (held the last Wednesday of each month from 17:30 to 18:30).
- Regional Municipal Chapters
In 2026, FLOSSK initiated a nationwide regional decentralization effort by launching its first municipal chapter, FLOSSK Ferizaj, on March 21, 2026, at the Ndritare coworking space. The initiative organizes regular developer meetups and hardware workshops aimed at establishing the Innovation Center Ferizaj as a regional technology hub.
5. Flagship Conferences & Global Gatherings
- Software Freedom Kosova (SFK)
- Founded in August 2009 with an inaugural gathering of 170 participants at the Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering (FIEK), University of Prishtina, Software Freedom Kosova (SFK) is the oldest and leading open-source conference in Southeastern Europe. SFK bridges local technologists with the global movement, featuring a multidisciplinary program of technical keynotes, workshops, and digital rights panels. Over nearly two decades, SFK has hosted foundational figures of the free software movement, including Richard Stallman, Peter Salus, Bruce Perens, Rob Savoye, Mikel Maron, and David Cuartielles. Following its 10th jubilee edition in 2025 on open hardware and AI, the conference marks its 11th edition in October 2026 at FIEK under the theme "A Murder of Crows," exploring complex emergent systems and European open-source compliance standards.
- International Event Hosting
FLOSSK has placed Kosovo on the international technology map by organizing major global open-source gatherings:
- OSGeo
- FOSS4G 2023 (Prizren)
- DebConf22 (ITP Prizren): The 23rd annual Debian Developers Conference, uniting more than 300 international operating system contributors.
- BSides Prishtina: An annual community-driven information security conference bringing together regional cyber defense professionals.
6. Civic Tech, Citizen Science & Open Cultural Commons
FLOSSK develops and maintains civic technology and open data projects throughout the year:
- Digital Archiving & Cultural Commons (books.flossk.org)
- Addressing the scarcity of accessible regional literature, FLOSSK built an open-hardware book scanning pipeline using a custom V-shaped platen cradle scanner, ScanTailor processing, and Tesseract OCR. Operating under Article 12A of Kosovo's copyright law governing orphan works, the platform provides free public access to historical literature and periodicals—such as the complete digital archives of the daily newspaper Bujku (1991–1998) and Rilindja—under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license. These scans have also been transformed into machine-readable HuggingFace research corpora (Kushtrim/bujku and Kushtrim/bujku_vl_ocr) to support Vision-Language Model research for the Albanian language
- Open Mapping & Geodata
- FLOSSK serves as the official OpenStreetMap (OSM) Foundation Chapter and OSGeo Local Chapter for Kosovo, hosting regular mapathons and maintaining geographical datasets that originated with the historic mapping of Brod town with UN-HABITAT in 2009.
- OpenCatalog (catalog.flossk.org)
- A community-curated directory designed to help public institutions, developers, and local businesses evaluate, test, and deploy verified open-source alternatives to proprietary enterprise software.
- Civic Repositories
- Practical open-source software packages maintained on GitHub, including trash (waste management mapping for Prishtina), folsh.ai-tts-api (Albanian text-to-speech API), and iot-albanian-commands.
7. Governance and Community Structure
FLOSSK is governed through a democratic, member-driven framework:
- The Assembly of Members (Kuvendi i Anëtarëve)
- The supreme decision-making body, composed of Full (Voting) Members, which approves organizational statutes, reviews annual financial reports, and elects executive leadership.
- The Executive Board (Bordi Ekzekutiv)
- A governing body that oversees strategic management, financial integrity, and program implementation.
- Membership Model
- Structured into Associate (Contributing) Members (who propose projects, participate in working groups, and use hackerspace resources) and Full (Voting) Members (who take direct ownership of governance and statutory elections).