Category: Uncategorized

…and today is Software Freedom Day!

Posted on by Pockey Lam
The Digital Freedom Foundation is very happy to announce that today is Software Freedom Day! You can head towards the SFD 2019 map to find an event in your area or simply decide you run your own by follwing the steps below:
1. Create a wiki account if you don’t already have one
2. Create a wiki page in your area under this page
3. Go to the registration page to register and let us know exactly who and where you are.

At the end of all this you’ll appear on the SFD 2019 Map and can read our exhaustive StartGuide to gather a few ideas. Should you have any question you can as well post any question on the SFD-Discuss mailing list where a few old timers (and young timers) will happily try to figure things out.

So get ready to celebrate and happy preparations to all!

2016 SFD Registration is on!

Posted on by Pockey Lam

web-banner-chat-registerThe Digital Freedom Foundation is very happy to announce that registration of its thirteenth edition of Software Freedom Day has just opened. While the wiki has been back online for about a week we were still lagging on the registration. Fear no more, it is now fixed and you can all register your events!

On the bright side we have a newly configured server and brand new websites for SFD and DFF. Other sites and efforts are on the way.

On the sponsorship side we are keeping the same organizations for SFD, Google being our major sponsor, Linode and Canonical helping us on the infrastructure sides. Full details are available on this page.

We would like to point out a new additional sponsor for DFD in the name of Freiheit this year (from our perspective).

So as usual registration happens after you have created your event page on the wiki. We have an exhaustive guide here at http://wiki.softwarefreedomday.org/StartGuide for newcomers and for the others who need help, the SFD-Discuss mailing list is probably the best place to get prompt support.

So get ready to celebrate and happy preparations to all!

Celebrate SFD with us on September 17, 2016!

Digital21 Consultation Hong Kong

Posted on by Pockey Lam

digital21-2013NovEnd of October saw us visiting Hong Kong another time. While we will not attend the OpenStack Summit the main purpose of our visit was to attend a round table discussion on the government’s digital 21 consultation organized by Charles Mok office and Hong Kong in-Media. We were actually introduced to in-Media by our nice friends from Google and asked to give an overview on Open Data and Open Source, while other participants covered the other fields mentioned in the document.

OpenData has already started in Hong Kong and the government seems to be interested to push the adoption further. While this is a rather positive move, the government probably needs to put some efforts on standardization and improving both the quality and the feedback loop on the available data. On our side we were lucky enough to be assisted by Pia Waugh, former president of Software Freedom Internation and now working for the Australian government implementing Open Data.

(Free and) Open Source unfortunately is not mentioned at all in the document and we covered how important it is for governments to support the effort and what others have been doing for the past ten years. Hong Kong is probably a place where software is mainly imported and the only way to get tailor-made applications which Hong Kong companies can expect specific functionalities to cover their needs is by using Free Software. Not to mention that the government is also planning to bring programming to primary and secondary schools as well as boost start-ups and the SME business in general.
Overall we had a thorough and lengthy debate on those matters and I felt our points were well perceived. We have been recommended to push the discussion directly with the department who wrote the proposal and are now preparing for our next meeting.

In the meantime you can take a look at the slides I wrote to guide the debate here: digital21hk-comments-on-opendata-opensource

DFF Hong Kong site launched!

Posted on by Pockey Lam

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.

Hackerspace Hong Kong

Posted on by Pockey Lam

dimsumlabs1

In order to promote Hardware Freedom Day that was hosted on April 20, I went to visit the only hackerspace in Hong Kong, the DimSumLabs. We met some new geeky friends including Graham, a professor at PolyU and Manolis, web admin at DimSumLabs among other many things… We had a lot of great discussions and talked from 8pm until 2am. We ended up agreeing to host some events in PolyU together in the near future.

The following Saturday, we went to do site visit and talked more. Of course we also met with our old friend, Mathieu who just started a hacking group in Hong Kong and had a very great first event. His main occupation these days apart from his job, is to work on an improved input method for Hong Kongese. We also invited him to join Digital Freedom Foundation as a director as he is helping us coordinating and running some local activities in Hong Kong, which happen to be a requirement now. All in all it was a great week, not really a HFD event but definitely big steps forwards for us.