Dear Document Freedom organisers, participants and friends,

Since 2008, we have been celebrating Document Freedom Day. What started as a
day for document liberation became an annual activity on the last Wednesday of
March, with groups celebrating from all over the globe. And after some
successful editions, DFD became the international day to celebrate Open
Standards. More and more international organisations join DFD every year to
celebrate technological environments in which no one will ever be forced to
use proprietary formats.

On the other hand, and despite all the international success and attention, we
are happy that DFD always remained a grass-roots movement. The core of
Document Freedom Day is, and will always be, you, who organise local events
throughout the world that spread the message about document freedom.

However,

   ***in 2016, the Free Software Foundation Europe will not run or organise
Document Freedom Day again.***

As you can imagine, this was a hard decision for us to make. But, we decided
that in 2016 the FSFE will focus on our core topics because Free Software is
facing a lot of challenges. Internationally extended regulations of DRM,
decreasing rights and possibilities to tinker with one's own devices,
repetitive tries to establish software patents in Europe and other challenges
call for the Free Software Foundation Europe to concentrate on our utmost
concerns: the promotion, spread and protection of Free Software for everyone,
public administrations and education.

Also we really can not anymore stand the fact that public administrations
spent most of their money on proprietary software, instead of investing in
Free Software. That is why we are planning to run a coordinated campaign in
different countries in Europe. And why we decided to shift our focus away from
organising DFD again but instead concentrate our power on further fighting for
software freedom.

However, we still see the need of further promoting the use of Open Standards.
That is why we would be open - under certain conditions [1] - to hand over DFD
and let another organisation(s) run Document Freedom Day 2016 / 17.

If your organisation is interested in running DFD2016 (or DFD2017), please contact

        eal@fsfe.org

and we can discuss all the details.

We really hope that we can hand over DFD into trustworthy hands and thank you
so much for wonderful DFDs in the past,

   Erik in the name of the DFD team

PS: If you know any organisation or team that might be interested, please
share this message with them


[1] which is obviously to run the DFD-website solely on Free Software and
    Open Standards and to not promote any form of non-free software or
    proprietary standard. But even more important is the vision and idea as
    well as the capability to support grassroot groups around the world with
    the promotion of Open Standards.



--
No one shall ever be forced to use non-free software
Erik Albers | FSFE | https://fsfe.org/about/albers
OpenPGP Key-ID: 0x8639DC81 on keys.gnupg.net
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