SFD-announce

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sfd-announce@mailman3.com

July 2011

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SFD 2011 registration is LIVE!!!

by Frederic Muller - SFI

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

July 23, 2011

2010 competition results announcement

by Frederic Muller - SFI

Software Freedom Day 2010 Best Event Competition result announcements: Africa, Asia and Australia under the spotlights! Hudson, New Hampshire (May 23, 2011) - Software Freedom International is proud to announce the SFD 2010 best event competition results. Software Freedom Day (SFD) is a worldwide celebration of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) with the goal of educating the public about the existence and the benefits of using FOSS in education, in government, at home and in business. The SFD Best Event Competition is an international recognition of the efforts made by individual organizing teams in regards to spreading the importance of Software Freedom and reaching out to the relevant groups of people in their area. Each year three teams are chosen and the awards given to those teams are meant to help them further in their tasks for the years to come. This year, two leading organizations from the Free and Open Source Software movements have joined us to reward those exceptional achievers: the Free Software Foundation, the non-profit organization behind the Free Software movement, and Makerbot, a private company pushing the concept of Free Software to physical media and making an fully open source 3D printer. Among the 40 submissions we have received the three teams that came out as outstanding organizers and promoters of Software Freedom in 2010 are spread over 3 different continents. We would like to name in no specific order: * SFD team Melbourne, Australia * SFD team Yaoundé, Cameroon team * SFD team SPCF-CITE, Angeles City, Philippines As a side note we are very pleased to see winners from different areas this year, especially Africa and would also like to mention some entries which didn't make it in the top 3 but definitely deserve to be mentioned: * CPU & Software Freedom Network team, Manila, Philippines * 8layes team, manila, Philippines * Limestone Coast GLUG, Mount Gambier, Australia * NOSK team, Lalitpur, Nepal The above teams should be an inspiration to all SFD organizers and help you to prepare for SFD 2011 which will happen on Saturday September 17th this year. About SFI - Software Freedom International is the non-profit organization at the origin of Software Freedom Day. SFI handles sponsorship contracts, official team registrations, sending out schwags to teams, the annual Best SFD Event Competition and many other things. For more information please contact: Frederic Muller Software Freedom International President info (at) softwarefreedomday.org or visit our website at www.softwarefreedomday.org

July 21, 2011