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SFD 2012 registration is now LIVE!
by Frederic Muller - SFI June 16, 2012

June 16, 2012

Dear all, It is with a great pleasure that we are opening registration for SFD 2012. In fact some of you have already started to create your wiki pages and even registered. As usual we will be available for support through email on sfd-discuss or on IRC (#SFD on freenode). There will be a few changes this year as Canonical will no longer be providing Ubuntu CDs to teams. Canonical however remains a sponsor of the event, they are just terminating the ship-it program to SFD teams. We are in discussion with other distributions to see if we can get something similar running but our hopes are not very high because of the logistic and costs involved. We will keep you informed if anything happens on that front. So we are currently planning to produce team packs for 200 teams based on the funds raised. The packs will be delivered to teams that registered on or before July 15th on a first come first served basis. Simply create your team page underhttp://wiki.softwarefreedomday.org/2012 (/country/city for most) and complete the form onhttp://www.softwarefreedomday.org/cgi-bin/register.py. All information and links are of course available from SFD website. As usual artworks are available underhttp://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 DFI 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. Also be reminded that there are still 2 weeks to submit a proposal to co-host your SFD event with us. We have been thinking that doing it one or two weeks after the official SFD date could make sense and enable to fly in some contributors from our global community. Full announcement can be found onhttp://wiki.softwarefreedomday.org/SfdSummit . SFD countdown is available much earlier this year, so please do use it. We currently have 2 languages available (English and Catalan) but hopefully more will come very soon. Checkhttp://wiki.softwarefreedomday.org/CountDown for instructions. Do subscribe to the discuss mailing list[1] if you haven't yet, read SFD Planet[2], read our blog[3] and tweets[5] to keep posted (or RSS feed[4] to them), and don't forget to submit your own BLOG to be added to the SFD planet if you participate in SFD this year (and blog about FOSS...). So let's get started and happy SFD preparations! The DFI 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) [3]:http://www.softwarefreedomday.org/en/blog [4]:http://www.softwarefreedomday.org/en/blog?format=feed&type=rss [5]:http://identi.ca/dfi/

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Software Freedom Day 2011 Best Event Competition result announcement
by Frederic Muller - SFI June 15, 2012

June 15, 2012

Hudson, New Hampshire (June 15, 2011) - Digital Freedom International is one more time very proud to announce the SFD 2011 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 again, 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 Lemote, a private company making PCs running only Free Software from the BIOS to the drivers and the operating system as well. Among the 50 submissions we have received the three teams that came out as outstanding organizers and promoters of Software Freedom in 2011 will be known by some of you for having organized SFD in the past (and some even won that same competition in the past). We would like to name in no specific order: * SFD team 8layertech, Philippines * SFD team CP-Union, Philippines * SFD team IEEE ENIS Student Branch, Tunisia As a general comment we were very pleased to see a higher quality of most events participating in the competition and would also like to mention some entries which didn't make it in the top 3 but definitely deserve to be mentioned: * Palestine Software Freedom Day * Bluepoint Linux User Elite * Algeria Software Freedom Day Congratulations to all! Full details available here: http://www.softwarefreedomday.org/en/competition/winners-2011 The above teams should be an inspiration to all SFD organizers and help you to prepare for SFD 2012 which will happen on Saturday September 15th this year. About DFI - Digital Freedom International is the non-profit organization at the origin of Software Freedom Day. DFI 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) sf-day.org or visit our website at www.softwarefreedomday.org

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Call for proposals to host SFD Summit 2012
by Frederic Muller - SFI May 21, 2012

May 21, 2012

Dear all, Digital Freedom International (Aka Software Freedom International) is proud to announce it will start co-organizing Software Freedom Days under the name of SFD Summit with one local team each year starting this year, and therefore we are inviting local organizers to submit proposals to host our upcoming and first SFD Summit around September 15th 2012. The purpose of co-organizing such an event is to raise the profile of our celebrations while bringing a public space for discussions about the future of our movement. Over the past two years DFI/SFI has been through important changes in its governance such as expending community involvement through various committees, tightening our budget to remain cash positive, surveying SFD organizers and enhancing the team pack to enable teams to reuse the materials they receive, just to name a few of our efforts. It is now time to raise collaboration efficiency by getting together! While this will be the first occurrence of a SFD Summit we are still very open on the details and expect proposals to enhance our views on the matter. Our current vision is to initially organize a great local SFD bringing in international speakers and attracting both sponsors and media attention, thus boosting the reputation and influence of the selected local organizer. Furthermore an extra day or two should be planned to work on the year ahead, programs and actions which could be run under the DFI umbrella and status updates on ongoing activities such as software development, infrastructure, marketing and fund raising campaigns. If you are interested in hosting the upcoming SFD Summit in September 2012 please submit a formal proposal to board (at) softwarefreedomday (dot) org before July 1, 2012 Sunday UTC 2359. The proposal should address all of the relevant topics listed below: - Introduction of the country / city / organizer - why is this a good choice? - Recommended venues and logistics - Internet access - Accommodation choices - Local 1 day tour - Local community / government / industry support - Detail budget estimation and potential local sponsors The event is recommended to run for at least 2 days on 15 and 16, September 2012, with a combination of parallel tracks (at least 2 tracks). The planning sessions for SFD contributors should not conflict with other SFD sessions. Other key points which will be taken into account when choosing a proposal, are listed on the Requirement List page a thttp://wiki.softwarefreedomday.org/SfdSummit/RequirementList . Please check it out when putting together your proposal and feel free to contact sfd-discuss mailing list (or the board) if you have any further question. Also note that all profits from the summit will go to the DFI to further help our actions. We are looking forward to hearing from you soon! Digital Freedom International

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Celebrate Free Culture with us on May 19th 2012
by Frederic Muller - SFI March 23, 2012

March 23, 2012

Dear all, It is with great pleasure that we are announcing a new celebration in the lines of Software Freedom Day focusing on Free Culture. Over the years SFD gradually promoted Free Culture next to Software Freedom and we believe it is now time to have a specific event for Free Culture. Why is that so you may ask? We feel for starter that the audience and participants are quite a different audience from the people interested in software. In fact artists from the Free Culture movement often use proprietary software for plenty of reasons and wouldn't feel compelled to participate in SFD (or event know about it). Then the format should probably be different. While SFD tries to showcase Free Software and explains all the great things you could do with it, a day to celebrate Free Culture should definitely showcase Free Culture work, that is: - exhibitions - concerts - movie projections - surely more What we have envisioned is a day where all the Free Culture artists around the world could walk in the street and play, act or showcase their work and explain to people what Free Culture is and why they have chosen to contribute to the movement. Of course there could also be some amount of discussions and debates, but we should definitely stay away from long presentations and make it a real festival where the general public would come and simply enjoy the show while learning about those artists. The side idea is also to give free culture artists one international day where they can unite and make themselves heard all together. We are seeing way too many attacks on culture these days with copyright extensions and abuse of consumer rights of fair use, or lobbyists trying to lock away public funded work for example. So 2012 will be the first year and we will start contacting various Free Culture supporting organizations to get their support. In the meantime we have launched the Culture Freedom Day website at http://www.culturefreedomday.org and hopefully should have the registration and the wiki up and running fairly soon. So if you have any connections with Free Culture Artists, Art schools or universities, art galleries, pubs that organize live music, restaurant which do photo/painting exhibitions maybe you should talk to them to see how they feel about organizing a CFD event. Discussion about CFD will be happening on the CFD forum at http://www.culturefreedomday.org/forum and we also have an IRC channel on Freenode @ #cfday for the geeks among us. So thank you all to spread the word, 'identi.cate', twit, blog and tell your family and friends! ----------- Digital Freedom International (newly renamed to encompass our new activities) PS: and SFD will still happen on September 15th 2012!

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New Year, SOPA and SFD 2011 competition
by Frederic Muller - SFI Jan. 18, 2012

Jan. 18, 2012

Dear all, Best wishes to all of you and time for me to send out some updates: - The SFI board has been re-elected. There is no change for 2012 which is a good thing: a little stability should help us to reach new territories :D - We are of course very concerned about SOPA and have joined the strike as many others. SFD website will come back from the dark on the 19th - Lemote, a manufacturer of MIPS computers using only free drivers has joined the rank of our sponsors for the SFD competition and will provide 3 Yeeloong netbook for the winners of 2011 (while prizes for the 2010 winners have almost all arrived, we're still tracking what's missing) - The FSF will be providing again Richard Stallman essays and Richard will sign the book himself for the 2nd year - The competition participation form is now live and can be filled here: http://www.softwarefreedomday.org/cgi-bin/report.py . Only teams who have registered their SFD events in 2011 can participate. You will also need to provide the email address used for registration. Rules can be checked when the SOPA strike is over at this address: http://www.softwarefreedomday.org/en/competition => any problem, bug, question please don't hesitate to email sfd-discuss Let's make 2012 a great year for all of us. We are planning to resume active preparations very soon and will let everyone know! Thank you for your continuous support. Sincerely Frederic Muller on behalf of the SFI board

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SFD is today!
by Frederic Muller - SFI Sept. 16, 2011

Sept. 16, 2011

Dear all! Forgetting we have up to 26 hours difference between 2 end points on the same planet and that a few teams have already celebrated SFD or will until almost end of October, SFD is here! While we are sure everyone is super busy with the last minute preparations we would like to draw your attention on the excellent community participation this year in making SFD a success. We have received many contributions of all kinds and we would like to thank and highlight those as they can be used to enhance your event. First for those still looking for a topic to present we have finally managed to upload our slides on "Why software freedom matters". Lots of notes have been added to the slides in order to let almost anyone make the presentation. It's however good to think about the topic before hand and be prepared for questions. Slides available at http://wiki.softwarefreedomday.org/Resources#Software_Freedom I suppose you are also aware that we've had 2 great songs contributed from 2 different teams from the Philippines, both licensed under CC-BY-SA. One of the 2 even has a KTV version should you think of making singing games. Either way those will be great to add color to your event and definitely some great atmosphere! Songs and details, credits, lyrics available from http://wiki.softwarefreedomday.org/Resources#Songs And since we're covering atmosphere, music and giveaways we would like to remind teams distributing non-free GNU/Linux distributions that we are providing a notice to be included with those CDs to let people know about the hidden non-free software they will be getting on the spot or later. Users need to understand what is included in the software you may be distributing. While we totally understand that some people already have bought their hardware and may just be discovering software freedom (thus needing proprietary drivers for example) it is our duty to let them know they can chose to buy hardware that is fully supported by free software on their next purchase, or be careful about the type of software they chose to install in the future. The notice has been pre-formatted to be easily printed and is available is English, Spanish and Portuguese thanks to our translators. Link to the English notice page is http://wiki.softwarefreedomday.org/Resources/CdNotice . You can easily navigate to the other versions from there. Another excellent suggestion from our sfd-discuss mailing list has been to hang out on the #sfd irc channel on freenode to show the global nature of SFD. We have a web interface from the website or you can point your audience to specific free IRC clients that will run on their platform. Should the English channel be over populated with non-English discussions feel free to create language specific channels such as #sfd-es, #sfd-ru or #sfd-jp. Last but not least do not forget to document your events, take photos, blog or share the news on social networks. The official tag for SFD is #softwarefreedomday. The great news is that this year SFD Competition has attracted great sponsors again: first we are happy and proud to have the Free Software Foundation provide Richard Stallman books signed by himself. And then Lemote, the Chinese computer manufacturer of fully free hardware (BIOS including) will be supplying 1 Yeeloong per winning team so you can fiddle with MIPS CPU and fully free software machines! So thank you to all, it has really been a fun ride until now and we truly believe that this year celebration is going to be exceptional! Happy SFD to all! on behalf of Software Freedom International

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4 weeks to go
by Frederic Muller - SFI Aug. 22, 2011

Aug. 22, 2011

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

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SFD 2011 registration is LIVE!!!
by Frederic Muller - SFI July 23, 2011

July 23, 2011

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

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2010 competition results announcement
by Frederic Muller - SFI July 21, 2011

July 21, 2011

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

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SFD Team Leaders Survey 2010 results published
by Frederic Muller - SFI April 12, 2011

April 12, 2011

Dear all, Results have just been published and are available here: http://www.softwarefreedomday.org/en/blog/149-sfd-team-leader-survey-results Should you wish to discuss further some of the ideas and points brought forward please do so on the sfd-discuss mailing list. Thank you. Fred

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