Dear all,
we have now about 4 weeks left to SFD and I wanted to update everyone
on all the great things which are happening this year.
We have been working hard on SFD promotion to provide easy ways to
advertise and attract people to your events. On top of the badges we
showcased about 2 weeks ago we now have a multi-lingual countdown
counter supporting all time zones. Currently nine languages are
supported (English, German, Portuguese, French, Khmer, Sinhalese,
Persian, Chinese simplified and traditional). It is very easy
to add a new language should you need it and even documented.
Link to countdown usage page:
http://www.softwarefreedomday.org/en/participate/countdown
Link to translation howto:
http://wiki.softwarefreedomday.org/CountDown/
Link to promotion badges:
http://wiki.softwarefreedomday.org/Promote
Since we are talking about promotion we would like to thank our media
partners as we have a few new ones this year, and we have kept the old
ones too. In no specific order those publications will advertise for SFD
this month or the next: Linux Magazine, Linux Journal, Ubuntu Users,
Admin magazine and Smart Developer.
It is also important to thank our corporate sponsors who have followed
us for quite a few years now and with whom we wouldn't be able to send
those team packs or have our website up and running: Canonical, Google,
Qt/Nokia and Linode.
And then we have the people from other Free and Open Source projects
joining the ranks of organizations celebrating SFD such as the FSF, the
FSFE and newly stepping in this year, FreeBSD and Joomla! We sincerely
hope this list will grow longer as everyone sees us working together on
providing speakers, joining communities and providing more content to
help raise the quality of all SFD events.
So considering the press coverage and all the promotional efforts we're
working on you should expect visitors to start looking for information
and events in your area. It is very important to update your team wiki
page providing at least an idea about:
- Your event location
- How to contact you or your group
- Date and time of your event
- Any more information such as schedule, registration info if any, etc
will of course be very helpful to convince people to drop by.
Another important point to highlight is that we are promoting Software
Freedom regardless of the operating system being used and that means
this freedom should be promoted on all fronts included on Free OSes. In
order to help you out when distributing non-free GNU/Linux distributions
and make this information process easy we have written a notice to be
inserted into such CD/DVDs. The purpose is to let people know to be
careful with what they are installing (or buying) even when using
GNU/Linux. The notice (together with an odf document to print 4 per
sheet) can be found here:
http://wiki.softwarefreedomday.org/Resources/CdNotice
We strongly ask for team organizers to use this notice when distributing
non-free GNU/Linux distributions (translations available in pt and es).
Also to help you with planning we have set up a few important pages
where you can find logos, slides, videos, templates, all source files of
whatever you can find on the wiki and plenty of more links. Head to
http://wiki.softwarefreedomday.org/Marketing to find a list of those.
We will continue working on providing more slides and ideas in the
coming weeks.
Another helping factor this year is that we have finally started to
translate our main website (the www one - we started with the wiki
guides last year). All this work has been done by the SFD community and
is progressing slowly. Hopefully we will get more done as we get closer
to SFD. The planets have also been upgraded and it is now very easy to
switch from one available language to another (note that not all
languages have planet, default is English).
And since we are talking about translations we would also like to point
out that we have launched 2 new mailing lists this year to complete the
existing Spanish one: one in Portuguese and one in Russian. Obviously if
you're speaking one of those 3 languages it's probably worth subscribing
and saying hi there! We will continue to speak English though (haven't
found the language learning pill yet) and provide updates in that
language. Mailing list info page is here:
http://mail.sf-day.org/lists/listinfo
Should you have any question either pop up on our irc channels (#sfd for
English or #sfd-es for Spanish) or mail us back.
Thank you all and happy SFD preparations!
SFI Board
