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Best Wishes and join us to celebrate Hardware Freedom Day on January 17th 2015!

by Frederic Muller - DFF

Dear all, First we would like to send you all our best wishes for the year to come. 2014 has been a challenging year for us as we decided to venture into new territories and things did not really go the way we had hoped for. But as the new year is approaching we do not fear and will continue to pursue our goals. This email is to inform everyone that Hardware Freedom Day is around the corner and will be celebrated on January 17th this year (we mean 2015 by that). The reason for the move was twofold: moving Education Freedom Day out of the holiday zone for South America and other areas where this was a problem, and getting HFD right after Christmas so people who have decided to step ahead and dive into the wilderness of Open Hardware during the holiday season can actually find an event within a few weeks of getting their gifts and create the opportunity to push their passion further. For its third edition as usual just head over to our wiki [1], create your event page and register your event [2] to appear on the map [3] with the others. So all the best for 2015 and for your HFD! Don't hesitate to send us messages on the HFD mailing list [4] if you have any questions of course. Happy HFD! Digital Freedom Foundation. [1] http://wiki.hfday.org/2015 [2] http://www.hfday.org/cgi-bin/register.py [3] http://www.hfday.org/map/ [4] http://mail.sf-day.org/lists/listinfo/hfd-discuss

Dec. 30, 2014

SFD registration is on!

by Frederic Muller - DFF

Dear all, With a bit of delay, the *Digital Freedom Foundation* is very happy to announce that registration of the eleventh edition of Software Freedom Day <http://www.softwarefreedomday.org/> opened early August. This year we are unfortunately unable to ship any goodies for the pre-registered teams: as we have mentioned before, our involvment with the Cambodian system of education required us to relocate. Being happy owners of a few special animals (CITES-II listed species <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CITES#Appendix_II>) we would not have moved without them. This took us about 3-4 months to make it happen and we arrived in Phnom Penh end of May. We then had to look for a place to live, get our furnitures out of the customs and a member of our team got hospitalized for ten days in July. With all this, identifying new suppliers for the schwag just could not happen. Nevertheless, SFD teams <http://www.softwarefreedomday.org/map/index.php?year=2014> have been very patient and nice with us and hopefully *SFD 2014* will not be too much impacted by this. So as usual registration <http://www.softwarefreedomday.org/cgi-bin/register.py> happens after you have created your event page on the wiki <http://wiki.softwarefreedomday.org/>. We have an exaustive guide here <http://wiki.softwarefreedomday.org/StartGuide> for newcomers and for the others who need help, the SFD-Discuss mailing <http://mail.sf-day.org/lists/listinfo/sfd-discuss> is probably the best place to get prompt support. We will come back with more details regarding sponsors, things to do or worth mentioning to bring inspiration and motivation to the celebration. So get ready to celebrate and happy preparations to all! The Digital Freedom Foundation

Sept. 2, 2014

Culture Freedom Day registration is launched!

by Frederic Muller - DFF

Dear all! Just a quick note to let you know that we've launched CFD registration. CFD is happening on May 17th (3rd Saturday of May as usual) and is intent to present Free Culture work in your area. You can either partner with Free Culture artists that you know (or not) or decide to pick some of the available Free Culture work to showcase to your area. This is surely one of the events we're running where the audience does not need to be technical at all and should just come and enjoy the show. Of course discussion regarding licensing, issues, the why and the how can be run in parallel (or after) to tell more to the audience. Either simply head to our wiki to create your event page and register by filling up the form here: http://www.culturefreedomday.org/cgi-bin/register.py All the best for this third edition! Kind regards, The Digital Freedom Foundation

March 20, 2014

Hardware Freedom Day is on, join us and celebrate on March 15th 2014!

by Frederic Muller - DFF

Dear all, With a bit of delay we are happy to announce the registration opening for Hardware Freedom Day [1]. While the event was softly launched about 2 weeks ago (and announce early this year through our Digital Freedom Foundation [2] website) we are happy to inform you that Hardware Freedom Day will be celebrated on March 15th this year. For its second edition we hope this is a good opportunity to promote Open Source Hardware and reach people who might not be aware of your existence. We also would like to encourage you to combines topic such as some treated during Education Freedom Day [3] (celebrated last January) where hacking open source hardware can definitely enhance extra curriculum activities for the younger crowd, a topic which seems to be of interest to the hackerspace mailing list[4] . Of course learning is happening at all ages and that would probably work for older crowd too ;-) So as usual just head over to our wiki [5], create your event page and register your event [6] to appear on the map [7] with the others. All the best and don't hesitate to send us message on the HFD mailing list [8] if you have any questions. Happy HFD! Digital Freedom Foundation. [1] http://www.hfday.org [2] http://www.digitalfreedomfoundation.org [3] http://www.educationfreedomday.org [4] http://lists.hackerspaces.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss [5] http://wiki.hfday.org/2014 [6] http://www.hfday.org/cgi-bin/register.py [7] http://www.hfday.org/map/ [8] http://mail.sf-day.org/lists/listinfo/hfd-discuss

Feb. 11, 2014

Happy holiday season and new year!

by Frederic Muller - DFF

Dear all, We wanted to wish you a happy holiday season (for those of you on holidays) and a happy 2014! 2014 is an important year for SFD and Digital Freedom Foundation, the non-profit behind it. We have now extended our celebrations to four in a year as the Free Software philosophy extends to more and more places. We have also merged one of our side activities, Greenboard, which is building a totally Free and Open Source curriculum to meet a tremendous need for technology for everybody and especially the unprivileged groups at the lowest possible cost. While currently only available in Chinese (as it is where it is developed) we are slowly translating it into English. So to be short we will be celebrating the following events this year: - Education Freedom Day: Saturday January 18th - Hardware Freedom Day: Saturday March 15th - Culture Freedom Day: Saturday May 17th - Software Freedom Day: Saturday September 20th You can of course find more information on the related websites[1] or ask us questions through the appropriate mailing lists[2]. Last but not least, we are headed towards our tenth year of existence and this would not have been possible without you and without all the supporting organizations which have followed us around the years, namely Canonical, Google, Linode, the FSF and FSFE, Creative Commons, FreeBSD, Joomla!, the Open Clipart Library, Foundation Ceata, Linux Magazine, Linux Journal, Ubuntu User, Admin magazine and smart developer. This year we will also try to raise more funds and hopefully hire someone to help us full time as it is starting to be a busy all-year-round activity. Hopefully this will make us more active and responsive to all the requests we are getting and better overall. So thank you all and let's make 2014 unforgettable! Kind regards, Frederic Muller -------------------------- Digital Freedom Foundation [1] - http://www.educationfreedomday.org - http://www.hfday.org - http://www.culturefreedomday.org - http://www.softwarefreedomday.org [2] - http://mail.sf-day.org/lists/listinfo

Dec. 25, 2013

Education Freedom Day Celebrations January 18, 2014

by Frederic Muller - DFF

Dear all, We are launching a new celebration as announced in August, around Open Educational Resources and Free Educational Software called Education Freedom Day [1] which will be celebrated on January 18th, 2014 (Saturday). The registration just opened and follow our other events process with a wiki page creation [2] and then registration [3]! The date has been chosen as mid school year in order to somewhat make an update on any project an education institution has been involved with, and look at what to deploy the next school year. There are nowadays hundreds of resources which we will try to list (a few of them at least) in our wiki [4] which goes from specific tuition to complete solutions depending on what your focus is. Some involve software, some don't (except for the materials to follow). We hope that you will be able to gather as many educators/teachers/professors as possible and make them discover OER communities and the immense possibilities that goes together with them. EFD support questions will be handled on the efd mailing list[5] or efd IRC channel #efday @ Freenode. Thanks a lot and happy EFD! ---- The Digital Freedom Foundation Board [1] http://www.educationfreedomday.org/ [2] http://wiki.educationfreedomday.org/2014 [3] http://www.educationfreedomday.org/cgi-bin/register.py [4] [5] http://mail.sf-day.org/lists/listinfo/efd-discuss

Nov. 27, 2013

SFD 2013 registration is now ON!

by Frederic Muller - DFF

Dear all, It is with a great pleasure that we are opening registration for SFD 2013. The wiki has been prepared with the current localized languages available and some of the translations for the Frontpage still need to be updated. We are still finishing some of the design including the countdown which will start working 99 days before the event. As usual we are available for support through email on sfd-discuss or on IRC (#SFD on freenode). The deadline for registered teams to get the free goodies is July 21st which should give us enough time to ship everything everywhere. Simply create your team page under http://wiki.softwarefreedomday.org/2013 (/country/city/team for most) and complete the form on http://www.softwarefreedomday.org/cgi-bin/register.py. All information and links are of course available from the SFD website. As usual artworks are available under http://wiki.softwarefreedomday.org/Artwork and CC-BY licensed. Feel free to use, enhanced and eventually localize them. I want to particularly thank our sponsors who are making this possible, namely Canonical, Google, and Linode for the time being. Should your organization be interested to sponsor DFF to be able to send more goodies please get in touch with us. Note that there is a deadline to be listed on the magazine ads we run with our media sponsors, Linux Magazine, Ubuntu user, Admin, Smart developer and Linux Journal, which is around mid July or early August. We will be going through various changes in terms of blog location and ways to hear about us, the main reason being that we have moved our non-profit to Hong Kong and the requirements are a bit different than in the US. Besides we are a lot of projects going on and those require some changes. So let's get started and happy SFD preparations! The Digital Freedom Foundation Board ps: do check the SFD 2011 winners for inspiration and thanks again to Lemote and FSF for the prizes. http://www.softwarefreedomday.org/en/competition/winners-2011 [1]: http://mail.sf-day.org/lists/listinfo/sfd-discuss [2]: http://planet.softwarefreedomday.org (language specific planets available through the language switcher)

June 16, 2013

Culture Freedom Day registration opens

by Frederic Muller - DFF

Dear all, This is a short message to announce that Culture Freedom Day is opening registration and will be celebrated the 18th May 2013 for a second time. We are expecting more participants this year and therefore will ship a startup kit to all pre-registered teams (teams registered before April 14th). At this time we are unaware of the exact numbers we are talking about, but be sure we will make our best to find the right stuff based on the quantities we have to supply. So without further ado go and create a wiki page[1] and then simply register[2]! Happy CFD. The Digital Freedom Foundation [1] http://wiki.culturefreedomday.org/CreateYourEventpage [2] http://www.culturefreedomday.org/cgi-bin/register.py

March 22, 2013

HFD registration is up!

by Frederic Muller - DFF

Dear all, As discussed previously, Hardware Freedom Day[1] is set for April 20th, 2013. We are just launching both the mailing list[2] and the registration[3] right now (hopefully without too many glitches). While we haven't confirmed any sponsor yet we are confident to raise enough funds to get a team pack ready and on time for the event. So don't wait, rush to the HFD wiki[4], create your event page[5] and register your event[3]! HFD support questions will be handled on the hfd mailing list[2]. Thanks a lot and happy HFD! ---- The Digital Freedom Foundation Board [1] http://www.hfday.org/ [2] http://mail.sf-day.org/lists/listinfo/hfd-discuss [3] http://www.hfday.org/cgi-bin/register.py [4] http://wiki.hfday.org/ [5] http://wiki.hfday.org/CreateYourEventpage

Feb. 21, 2013

DFF registers, announces HFD, CFD and SFD

by Frederic Muller - DFI

Dear all, Digital Freedom Foundation (formerly known as Software Freedom International) is proud to announce its new incorporation in the Special Administrative Region of Hong Kong. While the charity status is still pending approval as our bylaws, goals and three-year plan are being reviewed, the organization has just been incorporated and we opened our bank account on February 14th. We can therefore officially announce our plans for 2013 including the exciting things you already know about, and the new exciting stuff we have had in our pipeline for quite some times now. We will of course continue with the current schedule of two annual worldwide celebrations of Culture and Software Freedom respectively called Culture Freedom Day and Software Freedom Day. Both will be celebrated as planned, respectively the 3rd Saturday of May and the 3rd Saturday of September, putting CFD on Saturday 18 May and SFD on Saturday 21 September this year. Events registration will open around mid March for CFD and early June for SFD. As usual early SFD registrants gets to receive a free team pack and we are still trying to raise sufficient funds to provide the same benefits for CFD events. Now to the exciting new stuff: if you follow us on identi.ca or twitter, you then already know that we are launching a new celebration around Open Hardware called Hardware Freedom Day and which will be celebrated one month before Culture Freedom Day on April 20 2013. As Open Hardware mixes a bit of the three pillars on which we focus (software, art/culture and hardware) we have chosen this date to enable people to either merge HFD and CFD (as open hardware necessary involves design, which arguably involves artists) or only focus on the part they feel more relevant to them by only celebrating one or the other international day. In the future we are planning to move HFD earlier in the year to balance the three celebrations every four months and have HFD closer to Christmas as well, so people can show off all the cool open hardware gifts they got during the holiday season. Last but not least our yearly plan includes two other major milestones: the SFD Summit which was postponed from last year, which we need to realign with our current endeavours (HFD,CFD and SFD), and creating a curriculum about the digital freedoms we celebrate covering Free Software, Free Culture and Open Hardware. Both need further considerations as we are in the early stages of planning and will warrant dedicated announcements in due time. We would like to thank our former board members with a special mention to Matt Oquist, SFI founder, treasurer and vice president until end of 2012 with whom we obviously wouldn't be where we are today. Another thank you goes to our long term and faithful sponsors and partners would have followed us for years and without whom we couldn't provide teams with the schwags and competition prizes. Those are namely Canonical, Google, Linode, the Free Software Foundation, Linux Magazine, the Linux Journal and Lemote. To conclude our next focus will therefore be Hardware Freedom Day, on Saturday 20 April 2013 and official registration will open early next week. So get your hackerspace in order and join us to celebrate! ---- Digital Freedom Foundation ---- ps: hfd mailing lists are also pending and hopefully we should resolve the last issues within a few days. In the meantime don't hesitate to use the sfd-discuss list to ask any question.

Feb. 15, 2013