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!

Over 100 teams registered

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And while we’re 2 weeks within the opening of SFD 2013 registration a lot of things are happening. First we saw an amazing 103 teams registered from 39 countries! We are currently producing team packs for those early registered SFD teams i.e. the packs will be delivered to teams that registered on or before July 21th. If you haven’t registered your SFD event yet, simply create your team page  and complete the registration form. All information and links are of course available from SFD website.

Another good news is that we have been talking to our partners to sponsor us with promising prizes for this year SFD Competition, we will announce all the prizes in the coming month. Stay tuned with our latest news by subscribing to our mailing list.

What else? 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!

Happy SFD preparation!

Celebrate SFD with us on September 21, 2013!