Tag: FreeCulture

Meet the Guangzhou LUG

Posted on by Pockey Lam

guangzhoulugWe happened to be in Guangzhou earlier this week and spent a wonderful evening with the core members of the local GNU/Linux user group in Guangzhou. They gave us an overview of their group history and progress: basically it is a two years old group with over 700 people subscribed to their mailing list and around 5 core members to manage the group activities. They host regular meetings on a monthly basis in different locations such as restaurants or classrooms. They also organized Software Freedom Day events the past two years and recorded over 100 participants in 2012. While we shared our experiences of how we ran and grew the Beijing GNU/Linux User group with them.

They also mentioned that half of their members are interested in “free” hardware highlighting the growing connection between two movements that we feel very linked. In fact we cannot ignore the fact that hardware needs software to operate and a bit of free culture to make those logos, the documentation and the potential courses that go together to bring it to more people. Each of the movements (software, hardware, culture, OER) should care equally about each others in order to exist as they need one another to thrive. I truly believe that bringing those concepts as one within our communities and to the world will create a bigger impact for everyone.

To conclude, Guangzhou LUG wants to grow in terms of attending members and meeting frequency so we offered to put them in touch with the Shantou Linux Association as they are planning for their upcoming activities right now, and sharing ideas can’t hurt. Besides, there are five universities in Guangzhou with computer science classes which are located in the same area and could become a very prosperous ground for cooperation and activities. That’s another lead right there!

In light of all those discussions and plans we will be hosting a round table discussion mid December on our next visit to Guangzhou. We hope that getting members from each university and setting up a plan together will create a more diverse group in the area with a more balanced workload for everyone.

I am always very happy to meet passionate people from different communities and can’t wait to meet them again soon!

Culture Freedom Day is Today!

Posted on by Pockey Lam

The day to celebrate has finally arrived and we (DFI) are proud to announce a total of 19 events worldwide with amazing programs for this first edition of CFD. Spreading on all continents and even in virtual worlds we hope that there is an event for you and if not, hopefully you can get ready for next year and have something running in your area. We are already working with several organizations to try to make it easy to find free culture artists around the world and look forward to build on this successful beginning. So for now let’s just enjoy the show and celebrate Free Culture together!

CFD Countdown available!

Posted on by Pockey Lam

Celebrate Free Culture with us on May 19!In order to complement the nice web banners already available to place on blogs and websites the DFI marketing team has just launched a CFD countdown to further help with CFD promotion. In the same manner as we handled the different time zones for SFD we followed the same rules allowing everyone to display a countdown matching their own area. Of course translations are welcome (though none are available yet) and full instructions are available on the wiki. Simply ping us on the forum and we’ll activate the additional language right after checking all the files. And for the ones in a hurry just copy the sample code below (assuming you’re at UTC-4):

<a href=”http://www.culturefreedomday.org/”><img src=”http://www.culturefreedomday.org/countdown/banner1-UTC-4-en.png” border=”0″ width=”160″ height=”90″ alt=”Celebrate Free Culture with us on May 19!”></a>.

CFD Registration is On!

Posted on by Pockey Lam

As we are one month away from Culture Freedom Day, event registration has now officially opened! Simply create your event page on the CFD Wiki where you should provide information about the venue, the schedule and anything else you deem important. Then just fill up the form right here and within minutes you should receive an activation email which will validate your participation while displaying your event on our worldwide map. Of course should you have any question or problem during the process you can either post a question in our forum or try to catch us on IRC.

Celebrate SFD Song and many other resources!

Posted on by Pockey Lam

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqP6eJd6GZc

2011 Software Freedom Day is approaching, in order to help you with planning, we have set up a few important pages where you can find resources for your SFD event including the brand new SFD song “Celebrate Software Freedom Day”, torrent links to DVDs (OpenDisc SFD version, FreeCulture, FreeDistro), FLOSS application for Mac DVD, logos, slides, videos, templates, all source files of whatever you can find on the wiki and plenty of more stuff. Head to our marketing wiki page to find a list of those. A special thanks to 8LayersTech, Erwin Galang, Meric Mara and Deng Silorio for the composition of the very cool SFD Song!

We will continue working on providing more slides and ideas by the end of the week. Please also feel free to upload your cc licensed slides and other resources to share with other teams.

All the best to your preparation!