Celebrate Document Freedom Day on March 30

The FSFE has handed over Document Freedom Day to us earlier this year and while it took us a bit of time to get familiar with the way the current DFD website handles the events registration we have been steadily gathering more and more locations all over the world. So Document Freedom Day is happening on the last Wednesday of March, which is March 30th this year and Latin America seems very active in promoting Open Standards. We are very happy to meet new people thanks to the effort and will also celebrate our local DFD in Phnom Penh but slightly later on April 5th. If you are in the area please drop by, and if not please check the Document Freedom Day website for an event in your area. Happy DFD!

SFD Phnom Penh 2015 roundup

It’s the second time I organize Software Freedom Day in Phnom Penh! I would like to thank everyone who volunteered, joined and/or presented yesterday. We had a great event and a nice turnout. It seems we managed to have a better focus on our audience this year.

What is coming out of the event is a multirotor course with free and open source software with the National Institute of Posts Telecommunications and ICT (NIPTICT) and more regular PPLUG meetings, a few planned events with specific schedules, e.g. Sirko Kemter from Fedora already committed to help us to host our very first Fedora release party and installfest in Phnom Penh in November. NIPTICT’s President also mentioned that they are having a new building under renovation at the moment and we will be able to host a bigger event with 200 people capacity for Software Freedom Day in 2016.

Here are some of our great moments to share with you:

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Preparation before the event
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Mozilla Local Team
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Thanks to Sirko Kemter, we had a Fedora booth!
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Opening speech by NIPTICT’s President
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Free Software: what’s it and what can I do with it? by Fred
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Building multirotors with free software
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Localizing free software by Khoem Kokhem
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Fedora.next for everybody by Sirko Kemter
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Contributing to Mozilla community by Vannak Eng
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Open Source Mapping by Nhiep Seila
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Understanding virtualization by Sok Leap
We finished the event by playing drones together!
We finished the event by flying quadcopters together!

Celebrate Software Freedom Day today!

Free and Open Source Software has come a long way since its inception and while we’re celebrating SFD for the twelfth time, the FSF is celebrating its 30th anniversary. Every software company now tends to use Free and Open Source Software but unfortunately that has just set the Software more as a commodity with very little benefit for advocacy, education or awareness. And so, in a world with Free Software used almost everywhere very few people notice or even care.

Software Freedom Day is here to tell people why we need to remind ourselves of the importance of Software Freedom and to get all the communities together to celebrate and introduce their philosophy to newcomers. Probably more than ever we need to go out and demonstrate the great many things that Free Software has done and enables everyone to do.

As usual events are listed on the SFD Map and should there be no event in your area you can always get together and run one in the upcoming few weeks. On top of all the good things Free Software brings we would also like to remind people that a good way to get started can be through Outreachy, a remote internships in Free and Open Source Software open to everyone regardless of their origins or differences. The next round of internships is from December 7 to March 7 with applications deadline on November 2. This is of course ideal for students in the south hemisphere as the program requires you to be available 40 hours a week but also for anyone either looking for a career change or applies what he/she has learned in a real software environment.

With all these years of experience we are sure your events will shine. And if you’re a little short of ideas you can always refer to our resources. One of note could be the latest Blender movie released end of August maybe followed by a discussion of how the Blender Foundation has been so successful over the years.

Finally we would like to thank all the people making SFD possible and that is our sponsors like the Google Open Source Programs Office, Linode, the Free Software Foundation and our various supporters in the media and community arena. But of course more importantly all the various Free Software communities from Google Developer Groups to Free Software Groups, GNU/Linux User Groups and the various universities interested in Free Software among them.

So, Happy Software Freedom Day to all of you!

Celebrate SFD with us on 19 September 2015!

Software Freedom Day 2015 Phnom Penh

blog-sfd-pp2015The Digital Freedom Foundation is organizing our Software Freedom Day event in Phnom Penh together with the National Institute of Posts Telecommunications and ICT and the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications on September 19, 2015 at the NIPTICT Building. There will be 10 presentations and several lightening talks with topics covering free and open source software ranging from operating system, virtualization, drones, mapping, servers, to security. Here is the detailed schedule.

We aim to target both the university audience and the young workforce and expect to have a hundred audiences to join. All in all it’s been a joy preparing for this event together with Makara, Rapid, Arky and Fred. It also allows us to talk and plan resources with people from different local communities such as the Open Institute and FPV Cambodia.

The event will start at 1:30pm tomorrow, if you happen to be in Phnom Penh please do drop by!

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2015 SFD registration is on!

I am very glad to share with you that registration of the twelfth edition of Software Freedom Day has been opened since early August and you can see from our SFD event map, we already have 62 events from more than 33countries shown in our map. As usual registration happens after you have created your event page on the wiki. We have a detail guide here for newcomers and for the others who need help, the SFD-Discuss mailing would be the best place to get prompt support.

Don’t forget to tell people about SFD! Simply use one of the banners we’ve made if you are organizing, participating, attending or speaking at a SFD event by placing it on your webpages and link it back to your SFD event page or http://www.softwarefreedomday.org. You can also help us to promote SFD by placing our SFD counter with your own language as well!

So get ready to celebrate SFD on September 19 Saturday and happy preparations to all!
Celebrate SFD with us on September 20, 2014!