Hi everyone! The time has come to start planning your Software Freedom Day event for 2008! We will be opening registrations in mid May and increasing the number of team packs (shirts, CDs, balloons and such) to 300, so make sure you keep an eye out and register as soon as you can! We have a new board with new members (details at http://softwarefreedomday.org/sfi). A warm welcome to Fred and Peter! This years event will be September 20th, 2008 (please ignore the header of the website, it will be changed as soon as possible). Last years event ================ Last year we had an amazing event, with over 330 teams from over 90 countries. There were around 3000 participants reaching over 40,000 members of the public. Around 40,000 FOSS CDs were handed out, including Ubuntu, the Open CD, Mandriva, Fedora, Kubuntu, Debian, Suse, Knoppix, and more! The SFD events including installations of FOSS, demonstrations, conferences, presentations, radio, courses, some even used the day to collect food for disadvantaged families! The three events that won "best 2007 SFD event" were FOSS Nepal Community, SFD Nicaragua 2007 Team & Beijing Software Freedom Day (China). Congratulations all! Their event reports can be found here http://softwarefreedomday.org/Competition2007/Winners. Last year a lot of universities participated, however some schools also got involved, which was great to see. Loads of user groups always get involved to help get the word out about Software Freedom. There was excellent media coverage from many teams in many languages so great job everyone! Planning ======== The Software Freedom International team have been getting everything on track for Software Freedom Day 2008. Firstly thank you to you all for your great ideas and feedback from last year. It has helped us create a plan for this year which should see Software Freedom Day grow even more, particularly in the education sector. We will be providing more resources to teams, including a DVD with video and presentation content that teams can use or mashup on the day. We'll also be providing the OpenDisc (the new Open CD project) and more resources to teams such as artwork, templates and other useful resources. We hope that you all put stuff on the wiki to share with other teams and start emailing the list with your ideas and lessons learnt. We are hoping to have over 500 teams participate in Software Freedom Day 2008, and we should all try to reach a grand total of 100,000 members of the public! Start thinking about what is the most appropriate way to take Software Freedom to your community. Perhaps it is a stall at a festival, perhaps a computer literacy course using FOSS, perhaps some presentations at a local school or university. Get ideas for your SFD event planning from the Start Guide here http://softwarefreedomday.org/StartGuide. As per an email late last year, we are keen to get more translations of SFD content and information. We are in the process of setting up some infrastructure to facilitate this so stay tuned for more information about translations. New infrastructure ================== We are in the process of setting up new infrastructure as we migrate to a new hosting environment donated by Linode (http://linode.com/). This will increase our control over the SFD website and mailing lists such that we can avoid downtime, and also add new functionality. In the short term we will be doing a site redesign, a moin moin upgrade (the wiki), and some mailing list migration. We'll make sure this is as seamless as possible for you all. We are going to make reporting and registering much easier this year, with a few changes including a world map as the mechanism to find events rather than a list by continent. This will mean team pages will be http://softwarefreedomday.org/<teamname> rather than a really long URL as has been the case in the past. Thanks to everyone for their suggestions on this! We'll also be adding a "planet" to SFD, to aggregate blogs from our community, a new online shop and more to be announced soon. Thanks ====== Thank you to last years sponsors, to the rest of the SFI board, and finally, thank you to you all for helping take Software Freedom to the world! We are looking forward to seeing what teams come up with for next year, and we will be supporting you all as much as we can! Cheers, Pia -- Software Freedom Day 2007 http://softwarefreedomday.org/