SFD Hong Kong getting in shape!

This photo is licensed under an open license - CC-by See-ming Lee

It is with great pleasure that we are opening an optional registration for our Software Freedom Day event in Hong Kong on September 21 at Hong Kong Polytechnic University. It means that first the schedule is positively progressing, while knowing how many of you will attend will allow us to plan accordingly. We are aiming to target both the university audience and the young workforce, on top of presentations and workshops, we (assisted by various communities) will be holding booths (e.g. Fedora, LibreOffice, Blender, Stroke 5, Greenboard) to allow for more individuals discussions. All in all it’s been a joy working on this event, allowing us to talk and plan resources with people from the US, Netherlands, France and Japan, not to mention discovering a great bunch of passionate FOSS people like us in our backyard.

Still, almost 4 weeks to go and plenty of time to get great surprises! If you happen to be in Hong Kong on 21 September, please do register and drop by!

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DFF going into Open Education

greenboard-bannerBeing part of the Digital Freedom Foundation, I would like to share with you some good news!

DFF is announcing its inclusion of the Greenboard project, an Open Education project started in China and focusing on adding FOSS equipped computers to primary schools as a tool to their current curriculum. With years of experience pushing Free Software and OER in poor schools the DFF board has acquired great knowledge of the challenges associated with OER in general and specific educational constraints in particular, assets it is taking to promote around the world.

The first phase will be to publicize all its content into English so it is easily transferable to other places in the world with minimum efforts. Once this is done we will then be able to improve and develop more content while eventually starting to localize our resources to specific regions where opportunities arise.

Our current three international days celebrating and promoting Free Software, Free Culture and Open Hardware will be completed by a fourth day to enhance our efforts as well as bring light to the already existing hundreds of similar projects that the world counts today. The first instance of Education Freedom Day will be on January 18th, 2014.

SFD Hong Kong 2013

Thanks Henry Lawford for the nice picture

21 September 2013 Saturday (1:30pm to 6pm)
Lim Por Yen Lecture Theatre N002, N114, N115
Hong Kong Polytechnic University

We are organizing a Software Freedom Day event in Hong Kong which will be hosted by the nice people at the Polytechnic University! We have just confirmed the location and there will be presentations, exhibitions and workshops during the half day event. We are already in touch with different FOSS oriented companies and communities in Hong Kong to participate.

Considering the great news we have added a special section in our Hong Kong website where we will continue to provide more details. In the meantime if you are in town you can already start reading and get ready to come and join us! A big thank you goes to PolyU for the energy and the venue!

We are organizing SFD in HK

2013 SFD Team Packs shipped!

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They’re finally off! Yes, you read well, all the SFD team packs have left DFF office and are now on their way to your event. All registered teams before July 31 this year will receive the great stuff we have prepared for them. In total we packed and shipped about 200 packages together with our local community. This year every team pack includes not only our usual stuff which are three t-shirts, twenty t-shirt stickers, twenty balloons, twenty small-size stickers, a two-meter banner, and a A4 flyer, we also added three A3 posters and twenty big-size stickers.

A big thank you goes to GoogleCanonicalLinode, the Free Software FoundationFSFELinux MagazineUbuntu UsersSmart DeveloperAdmin magazineLinux JournalFreeBSDJoomla!Creative Commons and Open Clipart.

For those who missed the deadline, subscribe to our announce or discuss mailing lists to get notified next year and rush to our artwork page to download all the source files and produce your own goodies!

HAPPY PREPARATIONS TO ALL!

Celebrate SFD with us on September 21, 2013!

SFD Countdown Ready!

Celebrate SFD with us on September 21, 2013!The Software Freedom Day countdown is ready for usage in English. We are therefore informing translators and also people willing to add a new language that translation can start right now. All the instructions are available on the wiki at this page.

For those who already want to add the countdown on their page/blog/website the code is the same as last year and has the same support for time zones. So if for example you’re living in Paris (GMT+2/UTC+2 that would be) then the code to add is:

<a href="http://www.softwarefreedomday.org/"><img src="https://www.softwarefreedomday.org/countdown/banner1-UTC-4-en.png" border="0" width="160" height="90" alt="Celebrate SFD with us on September 17, 2016!"></a>

Should you want to run the script from your website and customize it to your liking you can find the source code here and you’ll need to add a cron job to run it every 15 minutes if you want to support all time zones. Else every day at 1am is probably fine. Full support available from our mailing list!

For those who are preparing for their Software Freedom Day event, please create your team page here and registration will be opened shortly, stayed tuned!

Happy SFD Preparation!