On 09/11/2010 06:48 PM, Michael Dorrington wrote: 
Frederic Muller - SFI wrote:
  
Dear team leader, wiki page maintainers,

I would like also to encourage people not to use the city page to describe your 
event. Here is why:

    * This is usually a shared page between all teams, so it should point to
      each team/event page
    * If so far there is only you, maybe it would be nice to allow another team
      to register and put their link on that page
    * Do not assume only you is interested in celebrating SFD in your city, you
      might be surprised to find other communities
    * Administration: having city pages with only team listing will allow us to
      easily move the pages for 2011, if there is a lot of stuff related to your
      event it will make the work a lot more difficult for us
    * If your team name is the city name, then just add SFD before or after the
      city name and you've got yourself a new team name separate from the city
      name. ;-)
    
http://wiki.softwarefreedomday.org/2010/Europe/United Kingdom/Manchester

I have used the city page to describe our event. Here is why:
     * We are the only team in Manchester that has expressed an interest
       in running a SFD event.
     * More, we are the only team in North West England, which has a
       population of 6,853,200 according to Wikipedia.
       http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_West_England
     * We have been bringing the various interested parties in
       Manchester together for an event. This is much better than having
       separate events. The event is run like a bazaar, with stalls
       having different aspects of free software. People can then cross
       pollinate. I recommend this model to SFD teams.

  
          o Make our community appear well coordinated to the press and visitors
    
I recommend that the SFI concentrate their efforts into advertising the
event and better preparing for next year.
The number of people who are into free software yet still don't know
about SFD is unbelievable. MFS and FFSUK have been doing their best to
advertise SFD around the UK but it is still surprising when you tell
someone who is really into free software about SFD and they say they've
never heard of it. After they know about SFD then they get really into it.
Next year it would be good to have:
* the registration open early (rather than really late like this year)
* a stable wiki (rather than the various wiki issues like this year)
* better advertising, including by the Sponsors and Supporters. (rather
than little and late advertising I've experienced this year even by the
Sponsors and Supporters!)
* a pack containing T-shirts, balloons, stickers, OpenDisc, FSF
recommended distros <http://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.html>
(rather just Ubuntu CDs like this year)
Dear Mike,

To address a few of your points, the wiki was a necessary upgrade. We were running a 3 years old version that we couldn't upgrade easily on our former web infrastructure (i'll spare you the details). Thanks to Linode (and Thilo) we have been able to move the content over and start from fresh. The wiki has been very stable, the only issues being some permission rights on some pages (and people not logging in), which were fixed within hours. I want to extend a big Thank You to Thilo on this who did all the migration work and most of the launch support.

As far as advertising is concerned we also managed to get an A4 page in both Linux Magazine and Ubuntu User this is publishing this month. This is something we didn't manage to do last year, and it should get you more visitors (those 2 publications cover only Europe).

I'm not sure why you're coming up so upset when we're nicely asking you to make it easy for the wiki visitors and maintainers, and consider that other teams might want to register, just to discover that their city page is "already taken" by another team.  This was not meant in anyway as a criticism but should be taken as a consideration for other potential teams. This is a collaborative wiki and the city page is a shared space.

Last but not least SFI has been running in the red for the past few years, with the board members themselves funding part of the schwags you're mentioning. I felt it was time for us as an organization to be able to control our budget. Shipping 3 T-shirts and 1 DVD all over the world is expensive, not environmentally friendly at all and of little impact on the event organization itself.

We're looking at ways to improve on this front by working out local partnerships. This is something we have done in China for the past 3 years and also in the US with the FSF 2 or 3 years ago (and are still trying to formalize). I think the whole system of sending schwags needs to be rethought and we'll have plenty of time addressing the issue in winter (for us in the northern hemisphere).

Another note is that all SFI board members are also involved in (if not leading) 1 or more SFD event in their region, on top of their contributions and time spent on SFI matters. Maybe a bit of consideration will make them happy to be spending this extra time and efforts :)

Thank you very much.

And of course happy SFD!

Fred
SFI Board

Back to organising SFD 2010 in Manchester.

Regards,
Mike.

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