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Software Freedom... in Oxford, and next week
by Robert Schumann 20 Feb '07

20 Feb '07

The coordinators of Software Freedom Day are meeting in Oxford on 3 March this year - and supporters of FOSS are invited to come chat with us about software freedom in general and SFD in particular. * DATE: Saturday 3 March 2007 * TIME: 1330 UTC onwards (till late afternoon) * VENUE: Freud's Bar, Walton Street, Oxford (walking distance from bus and train stations) * Maps and information about venue at the end of this email.[1], [2] Please drop an email to info(a)sf-day.org if you're planning to come - so that we can work out (approximate) numbers. == Background == Software Freedom Day is getting a professional makeover this year as Software Freedom International (SFI), the organisation behind this annual event, holds their first ever face-to-face board meeting. The coordination of SFD in previous years has been undertaken by the board [3], consisting of members in Australia, Pakistan, Nigeria, UK, Denmark and USA, using IRC and email as their primary means of communication. Their coordination has supported teams all over the world in staging their own local events, which vary from giving away FOSS CDs to staging seminars to demonstrating FOSS to their communities. After the overwhelming positive response for SFD 2006 (with close to 200 teams from all over the world registered) and the late delivery of support to some teams, the board has decided to shake things up and sharpen their strategy for bringing software freedom to the streets. Part of this has involved restructuring the board to enhance contact with teams, but we've also decided to sit down together and make some serious plans to grow SFD and further promote the spread of free software. The SFI board will be meeting in Oxford from 1 to 3 March, and on our last day of meetings we wanted to invite members of the local FOSS communities - or even those just curious about SFD - to come for a few drinks, some food, and to share your thoughts with us. Please do come along if you're anywhere near Oxford, and find out about our new ideas for Software Freedom Day! Our face-to-face meeting could not take place without the assistance of OSS Watch [5], the open source advisory service based at the University of Oxford. Many thanks to them, to our other sponsors, and to the teams that make SFD worthwhile. Make sure you have Saturday 15 September in your diaries for Software Freedom Day 2007, and we hope to see you in person, in Oxford! Robert. [1] Freud's website: http://www.freudliving.co.uk/cgi-bin/shop/page.cgi?user_id=526&file=bars.ht… [2] Google map to Freud's: http://tinyurl.com/2cenps [3] SFI board: http://softwarefreedomday.org/sfi [4] IBM: http://www.ibm.com/ [5] OSS Watch: http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/

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[SFD-TC] Contest update - deadline extension for documentaries!
by Matt Oquist 16 Oct '06

16 Oct '06

Contest Results We and the stupendous folks from lugradio.org will be juding your contest entries in the coming days, and the results will be collected on Wednesday and tabulated ASAP and announced! Documentary Deadline -- Extended! Several hard-working folks have contacted us to say they're working on documentaries, but they needed the deadline extended. In retrospect, we realize that of course that particular contest needs to have a much later deadline than the others. You can't get footage until your SFD event, and editing takes a while! So, we've decided that: * The "Best Documentary" contest deadline is extended to NOVEMBER 30th! That should give folks *lots* more time to work on their entries, and we're looking forward to seeing them! Documentary Entries - New entries accepted It wouldn't be fair for us to extend this deadline without offering to accept additional entries from other teams, so everyone should feel free to polish off their copies of Cinelerra (or Kino?) and do what they can to produce a SFD documentary worth the prize of an IBM Power5 series server...a nice addition to any server closet anywhere! As always, feel free to contact info(a)softwarefreedomday.org with your questions and comments. Regards, Matt Oquist -- --------------------------------------------------------- SoftwareFreedomDay.org : Celebrating Free and Open Source Software in Your Community info AT softwarefreedomday.org http://softwarefreedomday.org/ SFD Sponsors: http://canonical.com http://www.dkuug.dk http://ibm.com

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[SFD-TC] Re: [Planning-en] Report from Dubbo
by Matt Oquist 28 Sep '06

28 Sep '06

Great to hear, Andrew! Are you planning to submit any feedback through the feedback form? :) http://softwarefreedomday.org/feedback The feedback we receive from you all helps us to (among other things) seek future sponsorship, because we can quote your actual reported numbers regarding team participation, number of CDs distributed, number of people you talk to, etc. Keep sending these emails! We love to read them and see your pictures in the gallery ( http://softwarefreedomday.org/gallery/2006 ), but please take the time to drop by http://softwarefreedomday.org/feedback as well. And again, nice work, Andrew. It's great to see you all having such positive influences within your communities, and as I just told some friends today after seeing some of the African SFD photos, I can't even imagine how so many people think proprietary software is even remotely as valuable as FOSS. The sort of local empowerment that we all celebrate through our SFD events has no parallel in the propietary software world. --matt Andrew Swinn wrote: [Sat Sep 16 2006, 05:56:58PM EDT] > Howdy all, > > Well I must say we had an excellent Software Freedom Day. > > Our day was spent at one of our local shoppings malls with a display > that I had been organising during the week. It basically consisted of 4 > computers setup with Kubuntu, Ubuntu, Xubuntu and Damn Small Linux, a > projector hooked up to the Ubuntu machine running the Blender Siggraph > Demoreels and the occasional other video we had. There was also a > noticeboard that had various information leaflets for people to read. > > We had a little bit of press help promoting the event earlier in the > week. One of our local free newspapers, the Dubbo Photo News, published > a small article on Thursday. Our local prominent AM radio station, 2DU, > did and interview with myself earlier in the week which had some good > results as a number of people mentioned hearing it. The Dubbo Photo News > photographer visited us on Saturday to take a heap of photos and get > some information and they will be running it as a major article in next > weeks paper. > > The day started with about 200 Ubuntu CDs, and I also had a heap of > blank CDs which I was using to burn copies of the Open Source Free CD > for people. I think we gave away around half the Ubuntu CDs and about 20 > odd OSFCDs. > > There was lots of passing interest in our display and there were a large > number of computer professionals that were very interested, a few system > admins, an IT teacher/admin from a local high school, and others. Over > the entire day there was not one negative comment regarding open source > or Linux, everyone was most positive and there were certainly lots of > average people quite interested as well. > > Our club (Dubbo and District Computer Club) got a good lot of promotion > and we are expecting to get a few new faces at our next meeting which we > have lined up as a workshop to do a bit of a Linux installfest and to > teach the basics of the Linux CLI. > > I shall be putting together a page of photos at some stage tonight. > > I hope everyone else had a day as successful as ours was. > > Cheers, > > Andrew Swinn > Dubbo Team > > > _______________________________________________ > Planning-en mailing list > Planning-en(a)sf-day.org > http://mail.sf-day.org/lists/listinfo/planning-en -- --------------------------------------------------------- SoftwareFreedomDay.org : Celebrating Free and Open Source Software in Your Community info AT softwarefreedomday.org http://softwarefreedomday.org/ SFD Sponsors: http://canonical.com http://www.dkuug.dk http://ibm.com

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[SFD-TC] Software Freedom Day prizes - two days left to go!
by Robert Schumann 27 Sep '06

27 Sep '06

Reports have been coming in to SFD central about the awesome events that teams have been organising in every corner of the globe - thank you all for making this year's event such a success! We'd really like to give away some prizes now! We've got a few seriously powerful computers from IBM to hand out, and some T-shirts signed by a handful of leaders in the open source community. The deadline for entries in the competition is *this weekend*. Individuals can enter by sending us photos or logos they have designed, or telling us about their blog or other pieces they have written about SFD. The categories are: * Best event photo * Best localised version of the official SFD logo * Best global version of the official SFD logo * Best SFD blog coverage * Highest ranking Government official at SFD event (photo required) Your team can enter in the categories * Best SFD event publicity * Best SFD documentary * Best plan for FOSS deployment project on new server for community benefit * Best SFD event Entries should be emailed to comp(a)sf-day.org by 30 September - full competition rules and more information are at http://softwarefreedomday.org/Competition2006 We are looking forward to taking a look at your pics and press coverage! Robert.

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[SFD-TC] SFD 2006: Feedback please!
by Matt Oquist 21 Sep '06

21 Sep '06

(I apologize for the cross-posting, but everyone is welcome to submit feedback, not just team leaders.) The feedback form: http://softwarefreedomday.org/feedback Now that 16 September has passed and we've all had a few days to recover, it's time to start looking forward to SFD 2007, and the best way to start that is by looking back at SFD 2006 and learning from this experience. We want to know what works and what doesn't work, and how we can all improve. There are some obvious things SFI intends to change; we need to smooth out the registrations and supplies shipping process. But we need to hear your great ideas in order to make SFD 2007 the biggest, best SFD ever! Please go to http://softwarefreedomday.org/feedback at your earliest convenience and take a couple minutes to let us know about your SFD 2006 experience. Regards, Matt -- --------------------------------------------------------- SoftwareFreedomDay.org : Celebrating Free and Open Source Software in Your Community info AT softwarefreedomday.org http://softwarefreedomday.org/ SFD Sponsors: http://canonical.com http://www.dkuug.dk http://ibm.com

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[SFD-TC] Team event reports
by Phil Harper 16 Sep '06

16 Sep '06

Hey, Happy Software Freedom Day All! I just wanted to remind you guys that there's a TeamReports page in the wiki * http://softwarefreedomday.org/TeamReports I'd be extremely grateful if you could add a link to your team's report and photos, even if hosted off site, as and when you have one ready, this'll make it much easier to see who's been up to what and gives us a good page to submit to Slashdot (please, feel free to hit /. with SFD stories, http://slashdot.org/submit.pl ;)). Thanks, and have a great day!(if you haven't had it already), Phil.

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[SFD-TC] SFD is here!
by Matt Oquist 16 Sep '06

16 Sep '06

Many of you around the world are already celebrating, and I hear the weather's been great for some of you. I hope the rest of you fare as well. :) We'll be sending out a URL later where you can provide us with some basic statistics about your celebrations - how many people did you talk to, how many CDs did you distribute, did your materials arrive on time, etc. Remember to take lots of pictures, and most of all, HAVE FUN! With warm regards, Matt Oquist -- --------------------------------------------------------- SoftwareFreedomDay.org : Celebrating Free and Open Source Software in Your Community info AT softwarefreedomday.org http://softwarefreedomday.org/ SFD Sponsors: http://canonical.com http://www.dkuug.dk http://ibm.com

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[SFD-TC] Canberra SFD Event Report
by David Symons 11 Sep '06

11 Sep '06

Hi all, We had our SFD event last Saturday (9/9) so hopefully this report of our experiences will help some of you with your event. The setting was a stall at a computer market held in a former Bus Depot building in Kingston, a suburb of Canberra, Australia. We will have some photos up at some stage. Our setup was 2 tables with 4 demonstration PCs plus room for CDs and leaflets. It was backed with a banner with the Software Freedom Day logo (blown up to a series of A3 landscape printouts taped together) and lots of FOSS logos (A3 and A4 sized) on it. We had a team of nine, seven of us had the Orange T-Shirts on. I have put the text of our leaflet at: http://www.softwarefreedomday.org/teams/oceania/au/canberra/2006/Leaflet Demonstration PCs were running Xubuntu (on an older PC - Celeron466Mhz/128Mb), Gentoo, Ubuntu and a piping hot off the press Kororaa 0.3 pre-release which the Kororaa devs (who live in Canberra) finished for us at 2am that morning an dropped over (Thanks guys!). The general method was to approach people that seemed to take an interest in the stall, initiate a chat about Software Freedom and their own experiences with FOSS and offer them a CD or two with a copy of our leaflet. In 4.5 hours we distributed: - 250 leaflets - 100 copies of TheOpenCD 3.1 (ran out - could have distributed ~30 more) - 170 Ubuntu i386 - 8 Ubuntu 64bit - 9 Ubuntu PPC - 44 Gentoo 2006.1 i386 - 24 Gentoo 2006.1 64bit - 22 Novell SUSE Demo DVDs Some thoughts about the event. Firstly, Positives: - A lot of people stopped to take an interest. It wasn't like we were some shunned store. - The awareness level of Linux was good. (or course a computer market does bring a ready-filtered audience of people with at least a passing interest in computers). - A lot of people were interested in trying a LiveCD just to see what it was like. - A lot of people had tried Linux, and even if they had given up at the time, were willing to try again. Not sure about the other team members but my approach was to assure such people that the user experience (particularly hardware support) has improved markedly in recent times. - Running the Elephants Dream movie as a demonstration seemed to work quite well as an attention grabber. We didn't run it but Celestia has an excellent demo as well. - We felt we did a good job of presenting concept of software freedom. - The OpenCD was very popular. As were the leaflets. - Many people were looking for alternatives to avoid SpyWare/Viruses. - Having someone at the markets entrance to point out our stand and hand out the leaflet worked really well. - The T-Shirts did set us apart from the other stalls and conveyed a message that we were something a bit different. Negatives: - We offered doing installs but there were no takers - not many people had complete systems on them. This was probably a promotional issue. We didn't start organising our event until quite late and the move to a week earlier made things tougher. Also, knowing that the markets would bring in a ready-made audience made it possible to be lazy about it. A standalone event would be a very different matter. - (relevant to Australia) Awareness of Copyright Amendment (TPM) bill and its implications was quite low. Given it probably just came out this is to be expected. - Some people still might have seen us as a store. A front sign saying "Free Stuff" might have helped but could also have meant people just blowing by and helping themselves without a chance for us to communicate our message. - Our demonstrations could have been a little better. Kororaa was excellent, as was Elephants Dream, but possibly having 'live' demos of everyday usage (email/web/office) would have been good too. We lacked an Internet connection which made that hard to achieve unless more organised. Showing IRC support channels in action would also be good imo. Interesting: - Demographics - a lot of people there were aged over 40. Though again, nearly everyone had come to a computer market, not to a SFD event specifically. - A lot of people expressed an interest in putting an old machine to better use (eg. as a backup server) or an old laptop. __ All in all an excellent day that we all feel very satisfied with. All the best for your own event!!! Cheers, Dave. -- David Symons Canberra, Australia http://www.liberatedcomputing.net

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[SFD-TC] Fwd: Tshirts and balloons sent!
by Robert Schumann 29 Aug '06

29 Aug '06

Subject: Tshirts and balloons sent! From: Pia Waugh <greebo(a)pipka.org> Date: Tue, 29 Aug 2006 17:47:17 +1000 To: SFD Team Contacts <team-contacts(a)sf-day.org> Hi all, Half the tshirts and balloons have been sent today with the other half going tomorrow. There are about 140 packages all up, so we had to do it in two batches. We are sending everything by air mail, which means you will all receive your packages in 7-10 working days (about 2 weeks) in plenty of time for Software Freedom Day! :) Remember to blog and take photos, so we can build up the community buzz before the event. If anyone uses FlickR or blogs, please use the tag sfd2006 so we can easily find any photos and posts. Below are a few important bits of information about the packages: * The tshirts have been "valued" at $2 and the balloons at less than a dollar to hopefully avoid any import tax in all your countries. Most of the smaller packages ended up being valued at AUD$5 so hopefully that is below the taxable import amount for each country. * Each package contains 2 free shirts for teams, as many balloons as we could allocate reasonably, the details of your team pack and a team page with some useful details. Extra shirts were included for teams that purchased them and those that made special requests for extenuating circumstances. Get your last press releases, newsletter announcements, radio announcements and posters out this coming week to give people enough notice to come to your SFD event. Make sure your wiki page is up to date on the SFD website, and try to get everyone talking about it in the lead up :) You can find posters, artwork, press releases and more on the website. We suggest you print out little single-page information sheets with some basic information about Software Freedom Day and also about your local FLOSS organisations and community. The day isn't just about spreading the word of Software Freedom, it is also about growing your local communities, and gaining support for FLOSS. Please make sure you all do a final scan through the Start Guide as there might be some ideas you haven't thought of, or some idea you have that others might benefit from. Also, remember the competition! Details on the website. Many thanks to the gang from the Sydney Linux User Group (Australia) who helped pack up all the goods for shipping! They all put in most of a day to get everyone packed up and sent out to you all. - Mark Phillips - Andreas Fischer - Lindsay Holmwood - Julia Decates - John Ferlito - Jeremy Apthorp - James Dummay - Dave Dummay - Pascal Klein and his Dad - Chris Smart - Paul Wayper Have a GREAT Software Freedom Day everyone! We look forward to seeing all the reports and photos on the SFD website. Make sure you keep copies of old events and reports archived on your wiki pages for future reference. Cheers, Pia -- Linux Australia http://linux.org.au/ Software Freedom Day http://softwarefreedomday.org/

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[SFD-TC] SFD T-shirts and a proposal
by Robert Schumann 25 Aug '06

25 Aug '06

Today's the last day to order SFD T-shirts - get yours now from http://tinyurl.com/h3kgl ! The following email was sent to the Planning-en mailing list recently. Unlike the Team-Contacts list (this one), any subscriber can post to the Planning lists - so it's useful for asking advice from other teams, or coordinating efforts. Go and sign up at http://mail.sf-day.org/lists/listinfo/planning-en (if you speak English) http://mail.sf-day.org/lists/listinfo/planning-es (if you speak Spanish) Robert. -------- Original Message -------- Subject: [Planning-en] Introduction and a proposal Date: Fri, 25 Aug 2006 21:04:50 +1000 From: James Purser <purserj(a)k-sit.com> Reply-To: Discussions about planning for SFD (english) <planning-en(a)sf-day.org> To: planning-en(a)sf-day.org Hi all, Firstly a brief introduction. My name is James Purser and I run a community news site ( http://www.localfoss.org ) which focuses on promoting FOSS communities around the world. I also, along with my wife Karin, produce a weekly online radio programme called Open Source On The Air ( http://www.localfoss.org/Open_Source_On_The_Air ). We are planning a SFD event with a difference. What we would like to do is run a live broadcast that will attempt to talk to SFD teams from around the world. This would be a combination of live interviews and pre-recorded interviews. The aim is to have this show streaming live for those SFD teams who have net access at their events to show that its a global event, as well as help the different regions listen in to what everyone else is up to. I am looking for groups in each region who would be interested in taking part. If you're interested then please let me know, either off list or on, it doesn't matter. If you want to talk to me further about the idea then you can contact me via Skype with the username purserj1977 or you can hop on irc and find me in either #sfd or #localfoss on freenode. -- James Purser Producer/Presenter - Open Source On The Air A LocalFOSS Production http://www.localfoss.org irc: #localfoss on irc.freenode.net

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