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2018 SFD registration is on!

Posted on September 7, 2018 by Pockey Lam

The Digital Freedom Foundation is very happy to announce that registration of its fifteen edition of Software Freedom Day has just opened. This year Software Freedom Day is happening on Saturday September 15th everywhere around the world (or almost). While the SFD wiki was ready to create and update your event page we did a soft launch for the registration at the beginning of the month and have had so far 2 registration emails which didn’t reach the team leaders. If this happens to you check your SPAM folder and eventually email us on SFD-Discuss mailing list. Apart from that everything seems to be running smoothly.

On the sponsors side as we have received questions in the sfd-discuss mailing list so we would like to thank Linode, Canonical, for providing hosting, mailing list and some technical support for longer than we can remember. On the funding part however we haven’t received any money from anyone for the 4th consecutive year due to relocation of our organization and various other issues. We do however want to thank Google for their continuous support and hope we will resume receiving funding very soon.

So as usual registering an SFD event is as simple as 1-2-3:

1. Create a wiki account if you don’t already have one
2. Create a wiki page in your area under SFD 2018 page; then our team page
3. Go to our SFD registration page and let us know exactly who and where you are.

At the end of all this you’ll appear on the SFD 2018 Map with all the other teams here and be easy to spot.

If you need further information we have an exhaustive guide here at the wiki StartGuide page for newcomers and for the others who need help, and the SFD-Discuss mailing list is probably the best place to get prompt support.

We have also the SFD countdown ready and in 7 languages. You can find further information here.

So all the best and get ready for Software Freedom Day 2018.

Thank you very much and happy SFD!

The Digital Freedom Foundation

September is here!

Posted on September 1, 2016September 1, 2016 by Pockey Lam

September is the Software Freedom Day month (among other things) since 2005 (SFD 2004 was in August) and this year is no exception! As of last night we have a total of 58 events in 34 countries, with only 42 fully registered (you can see the location on our famous SFD map). There is always a delay between wiki page creation (which includes the plan, speakers, date and location) and the registration which ask organizers to specify where the event will happen.

What to expect from most events? Well Software Freedom Day is really an event to introduce Free and Open Source Software to newcomers and show them all the cool things which can be done using FOSS. While we have a resource page on our wiki to discuss about the various topics which can be presented we let each team decide how to organize their events. Usually events go through FOSS migration or how to gradually switch from proprietary software to FOSS ones starting by switching common applications such as email clients, office applications or other daily used tools. Once all this is working fine an Operating System migration is thinkable. Of course you will always have that application that has no GNU/Linux/BSD equivalent and it is always a pain. Among the various solutions you can either use a virtual machine inside your Free Operating System (but it will usually require extra RAM), dual boot or try Wine/Crossover. There is always the possibility to keep an extra machine just for that too.

Then you have all the more exciting topics about specific tasks or applications which are fully FOSS compliants. Among many Blender and its various projects are probably the more eye catching ones. You also have Inkscape and GIMP for the digital graphists. Then you have projects such as Open Street Map which everyone can make use of and contribute to, or web oriented application such as web servers, web analytics, content management software, configuration application for server such as Vagrant or Ansible, programming language and fun stuff like PyWeek or also educational applications and distributions to get your kids started.

And the list goes on… and then there are the social parts of the events where you meet people and do things together. We’ve had many variations of that over the years and we believe the 2016 edition will be no exception. What can you expect? Best is to attend and see for yourself.

And for the one still wondering if they have time to prepare for September 17, the simple answer is SURE!. You can start reading our StartGuide to get familiar with what to do, and then talk to other FOSS members of your community.

So don’t forget to put our countdown on your sites or blogs and see you all on September 17!

More translations added to the SFD countdown

Posted on August 28, 2016August 30, 2016 by Pockey Lam

Software Freedom Day is celebrated all around the world and as usual our community helps us to provide marketing materials in their specific languages. While the wiki is rather simple to translate, the Countdown remains a bit more complicated and time consuming to localize. One needs to edit the SVG file and generate roughly a 100 pictures, then upload them to the wiki.

Still this doesn’t scare the SFD teams around the world and we are happy to announce three more languages are ready to be used: French, Chinese and German!

So should you need to use one of those three languages you can simply use the following code to display the countdown on your website or blog:

English:

Simply go to the English countdown page to get the code to insert.

French:

Simply go to the French countdown page to get the code to insert.

Simplified Chinese:

Simply go to the Chinese countdown page to get the code to insert.

German:

Simply go to the German countdown page to get the code to insert.

Update on August 29:

Thanks to the SFD community, two more languages have been added:

Portuguese-Brazil:

Simply go to the Portuguese Brazil countdown page to get the code to insert.

Portuguese

Simply go to the Portuguese countdown page to get the code to insert.

Happy SFD to all!

2016 SFD Registration is on!

Posted on August 22, 2016March 14, 2017 by Pockey Lam

The 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!

SFD Countdown Ready!

Posted on August 19, 2016 by Pockey Lam

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" alt="Celebrate SFD with us on September 17, 2016!" width="160" height="90" border="0" /></a>

The new svg file in English is here.

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!

If you are preparing for your Software Freedom Day events, please create your team page here and registration will be opened shortly, stayed tuned!

Happy Software Freedom Day Preparation!