30 years of FSF

After an exciting weekend celebrating Hardware Freedom Day what could possibly be better than going back to the very inspiring video made to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Free Software Foundation? Indeed it’s been made using Free Software only and goes through the work of the foundation for the past thirty years. It’s actually nice to look at, positive and very well animated. We will definitely encourage all our software freedom day teams to use it during their events. But let us say no more and let you enjoy it if you’ve missed it so far:

And then, for the ones into this kind of work, and blender in particular, you can find a detailed explanation of the challenges that the makers of the work went through and how they fixed them right here. Definitely a great read into the whole process from design to finish. Great job guys! And of course a happy 30th anniversary to the FSF from the Digital Freedom Foundation and all its members!

Speaking at FOSSASIA 2014 tomorrow!

fossasiaI will be giving a talk tomorrow at FOSSASIA 2014 in Phnom Penh, Cambodia about my work in Open Education. The talk (entitled “Let’s Raise Kids Up”) will be part of the opening keynotes. It will give a quick introduction of the Greenboard project and all the works done around Beijing since 2007. I will also be joining the panel discussion about Women in IT together with Hong Phuc Dang (FOSSASIA), Cat Allman (Google), Sindhu Sundar (GNOME), Sneha Priscilla Makini (GNU Mailman) and Richa Jain (Mediawiki).

If anybody is interested in deploying free and open source projects in schools, I am running a workshop on 1st March (10am) too. I will present all the tips we discovered the hard way from running our own open education project ranging from hardware donation, curriculum design to using Free Software and customizing or translating the possible solution. It will of course talk about GNU/Linux, some of the GNOME and KDE educational applications we are using as well as putting it all together and allowing teachers to control the classroom.
Thanks for Mario Behling and Hong Phuc for hosting such a great event! And of course thanks for FOSSASIA sponsoring my trip to participate!

Google Code-in 2013 is launched!

GCI-2013-bI would like to share with you that Google (long term sponsor and supporter of the Digital Freedom Foundation) has launched its Code-in 2013 program, an online contest to introduce 13-17 year old pre-university students to free and open source software development. The contest is similar to the Google Summer of Code program for older students in that it gives participants the opportunity to work with mentors from carefully chosen free and source software projects on real-world coding and related tasks like QA, documentation and more. Over the last 3 years over 1200 students from 71 countries have participated. Google hope to expand the program this year and would appreciate your help and that of the members of your community to spread the word to girls and boys around the world.

The contest begins on Monday, November 18th 2013 and runs through January 5th, 2014. Prizes for participating – online only! – in the contest include certificates, tee-shirts, and an all-expenses paid trip to Google headquarters in California, USA for 20 Grand Prize winners with a parent or legal guardian.

You can learn more by watching a screencast and/or a short video describing the contest here and by visiting the program site for complete details here. You can also download a flyer about the program here. Please help to spread the word and get more students involved in FOSS by joining the Google Code-in program!

Meet the Guangzhou LUG

guangzhoulugWe happened to be in Guangzhou earlier this week and spent a wonderful evening with the core members of the local GNU/Linux user group in Guangzhou. They gave us an overview of their group history and progress: basically it is a two years old group with over 700 people subscribed to their mailing list and around 5 core members to manage the group activities. They host regular meetings on a monthly basis in different locations such as restaurants or classrooms. They also organized Software Freedom Day events the past two years and recorded over 100 participants in 2012. While we shared our experiences of how we ran and grew the Beijing GNU/Linux User group with them.

They also mentioned that half of their members are interested in “free” hardware highlighting the growing connection between two movements that we feel very linked. In fact we cannot ignore the fact that hardware needs software to operate and a bit of free culture to make those logos, the documentation and the potential courses that go together to bring it to more people. Each of the movements (software, hardware, culture, OER) should care equally about each others in order to exist as they need one another to thrive. I truly believe that bringing those concepts as one within our communities and to the world will create a bigger impact for everyone.

To conclude, Guangzhou LUG wants to grow in terms of attending members and meeting frequency so we offered to put them in touch with the Shantou Linux Association as they are planning for their upcoming activities right now, and sharing ideas can’t hurt. Besides, there are five universities in Guangzhou with computer science classes which are located in the same area and could become a very prosperous ground for cooperation and activities. That’s another lead right there!

In light of all those discussions and plans we will be hosting a round table discussion mid December on our next visit to Guangzhou. We hope that getting members from each university and setting up a plan together will create a more diverse group in the area with a more balanced workload for everyone.

I am always very happy to meet passionate people from different communities and can’t wait to meet them again soon!

DFF Hong Kong site launched!

dff-hk-site

Digital Freedom Foundation is launching a new website for DFF Hong Kong to represent our local activities. Of course having local activities means we need to be very clear towards our public and have therefore decided to have a different website for what we are doing in Hong Kong. Most likely this will not change much of your relationship with us but this can also be a different angle to your perspective on Free Software, Culture and Hardware and what can be nurtured in your area. We are currently leading a bi-monthly Free Software hackfest called the Loop in Hong Kong and happening at the local hackerspace. Beside that we have set up a forum for members and curious people alike to ask questions or simply participate. We looked at the various possible options and came up with that compromise thinking you can still RSS feed or email subscribe to receive all the notifications. Hopefully this will prove to be working for our group.

So without any further ado please let us introduce you to our Digital Freedom Foundation Hong Kong activities. If you are in Hong Kong, please do come and drop by to visit us at the Loop or just leave us a message in our forum.