Dear all,
This is with a great pleasure (and small delay) that we are announcing
registration opening for SFD 2011! In fact some of you have already
started to create you wiki pages and participated in the soft opening
and registration testing that we started 2 days ago. Most bugs should
have been cleared out of the way and I remain available for any problem
you may encounter through email or on IRC (#SFD on freenode).
Major highlights of the registration rewriting:
- I didn't get any help from anyone so it took more time (I am no developer)
- UTF-8 support, so all those South-American addresses we used to
struggle with because of corrupted letters should be problems of the past
- Better SFD Wiki URL check (I'd say 100% reliable now)
- Ported to python so I can 'maintain' it now
- The form asks for and matches SFD wiki login and email address which
will allow you to update map coordinates later (still need to code that
update bit)
- Fixed Open Street Map marker click offset
- Total event count on the global map page
- Easy integration with the current web site design, and any design.
That will make it easier for others to use it since we said we would
release the code (still needs to do some cleanup and documentation
writing though)
- Saves directly in CSV format making it a lot easier to handle that big
file at the end of the registration period.
There are still one or two known issues (like the phone number format
only gets check on the server side, requiring you to refill the form if
you got it wrong - but we're working on it).
Hopefully it should make the whole experience better and allow us to fix
or improve it based on the feedback we get. A special thanks goes to
Charles from Canada who spotted a very annoying address input bug and
Jean from Belgium who sent me an extensive report, and all the others
who participated.
The other news for the year is that we are cash positive again and
goodies are in production as we speak. This year we have raised
sufficient funds to produce team packs for 200 teams (50% of last year
total registered events).
I want to particularly thank our sponsors who are making this possible,
namely Canonical, Google, Nokia/Qt in China and Linode. We have also
attracted more media sponsors this year (from 2 to 5 in total now) where
we are running a A4/Letter size ad in the August/September edition for
most (some are quarterly magazines). In no specific order those are
Linux Magazine (long time partner), Linux Journal (yeah, welcome!),
Ubuntu User, Admin Magazine and Smart Developer. And we are still in
discussion with 2 or 3 other organizations.
This year we also had a lot of back and forth with the Free Software
Foundation about the impact of distributing non-free GNU/Linux
distributions and pretending 'it is ok'. At the end proprietary software
remains proprietary be it an office application or a device driver. Our
objective is to educate the world about using high quality free and open
source software and that is what we should be doing. This is a long
topic and we will get back to it later this summer.
Like last year there are about 10 days to goodies deadline (limited to
the first 200 teams and Canonical is still providing Ubuntu CDs), so
just go create a new team page under
http://wiki.softwarefreedomday.org/2011 (not continent this year) and
fill that form on http://www.softwarefreedomday.org/cgi-bin/register.py
Last but not least I want to thank all the new volunteers who have
joined the SFD global marketing team and are helping with global tasks.
One of the net outcome has been our new SFD logo for 2011 which we will
keep moving forward (thank you David, Jeff and Maxus Singapore) and the
multimedia DVD which we have finally managed to make (thank you Diego,
Marcos, Pockey). All artworks are available on
http://wiki.softwarefreedomday.org/Artwork and under a CC-BY license.
And happy SFD preparations!
Do subscribe to the discuss mailing list[1] if you haven't yet, read SFD
Planet [2] read our blog[3] to keep posted (or RSS feed[4] to it).
Any question do let us know.
The SFI Board
ps: do check the SFD 2010 winners for inspiration and thank you to
Makerbot and FSF for the prizes.
http://www.softwarefreedomday.org/en/competition/winners-2010
[1]: http://mail.sf-day.org/lists/listinfo/sfd-discuss
[2]: http://planet.softwarefreedomday.org (we also have Spanish,
Portuguese and German - URLs need to be updated)
[3]:http://www.softwarefreedomday.org/en/blog
[3]: http://www.softwarefreedomday.org/en/blog?format=feed&type=rss
