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!
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Digital Freedom Foundation
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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.
