And while we’re 2 weeks within the opening of SFD 2012 registration a lot of things are happening. First we saw an amazing 100 teams registered from 47 countries! We are currently producing team packs for 200 SFD teams. The packs will be delivered to teams that registered on or before July 15th on a first come first served basis. 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 three excellent proposals were received for the upcoming SFD Summit, we (DFI) are currently reviewing those proposals and asking clarifications to the respective teams emails hopefully we can announce the location in the coming week!

The SFD countdown is now available in seven languages which are Portuguese,  Arabic, Catalan, English, French, German and Simp. Chinese. If you would like to localize the SFD countdown to your language, simply follow the instruction here on http://wiki.softwarefreedomday.org/CountDown

It’s very easy to help us promote Software Freedom Day! Tell the world if you are organizing, attending, participating or speaking at a SFD event by placing one of these banners on your website / webpage / blog and link it back to http://www.softwarefreedomday.org.

All the best to your SFD event preparation!

We are about 3 months away from Software Freedom Day, it’s probably the right time to resume our marketing committee IRC meeting. It is a monthly meeting hosting on the 2nd Sunday (UTC 1400) of the month. You may use http://www.timeanddate.com/ to convert to your local time. Our first meeting will be on July 8th (Sunday). Agenda can be found on http://wiki.softwarefreedomday.org/MarketingCommittee/Agenda

We are open for anybody who is interested to help spread the word for SFD or FOSS! If you are interested in marketing SFD, you should also join our marketing mailing list here.

First meeting schedule

• Date: July 8th (Sunday)
• Time: UTC 1400
• Channel: sfd-marketing
• Server: Freenode
• Agenda: Here

The SFD countdown is now available in five languages which are Catalan, English, French, German and Simp. Chinese. If you would like to localize the SFD countdown to your language, simply follow the instruction here on http://wiki.softwarefreedomday.org/CountDown

It’s in fact very easy to help us promote Software Freedom Day! Tell the world if you are organizing, attending, participating or speaking at a SFD event by placing one of these banners on your website / webpage / blog and link it back to http://www.softwarefreedomday.org.

Spread the words of Software Freedom!

It is with a great pleasure that we are opening registration for SFD 2012. In fact some of you have already started to create your wiki pages and even registered. As usual we will be available for support through email on sfd-discuss or on IRC (#SFD on freenode).

There will be a few changes this year as Canonical will no longer be providing Ubuntu CDs to teams. Canonical however remains a sponsor of the event, they are just terminating the ship-it program to SFD teams. We are in discussion with other distributions to see if we can get something similar running but our hopes are not very high because of the logistic and costs involved. We will keep you informed if anything happens on that front.

So we are currently planning to produce team packs for 200 teams based on the funds raised. The packs will be delivered to teams that registered on or before July 15th on a first come first served basis. Simply create your team page  and complete the registration form. All information and links are of course available from SFD website.

As usual artworks are available here and CC-BY licensed. Feel free to use, enhanced and eventually localize them.

We would like to particularly thank our sponsors who are making this possible, namely Canonical, Google, and Linode for the time being. Should your organization be interested to sponsor DFI to be able to send more goodies please get in touch with us. Note that there is a deadline to be listed on the magazine ads we run with our media sponsors, Linux Magazine, Ubuntu user, Admin, Smart developer and Linux Journal, which is around mid July.

Also be reminded that there are still 2 weeks to submit a proposal to co-host your SFD event with us. We have been thinking that doing it one or two weeks after the official SFD date could make sense and enable to fly in some contributors from our global community. Full announcement can be found on http://wiki.softwarefreedomday.org/SfdSummit .

SFD countdown is available much earlier this year, so please do use it. We currently have 2 languages available (English and Catalan) but hopefully more will come very soon. Check http://wiki.softwarefreedomday.org/CountDown for instructions.

Do subscribe to the discuss mailing list[1] if you haven’t yet, read SFD Planet[2], read our blog[3] and tweets[5] to keep posted (or RSS feed[4] to them), and don’t forget to submit your own BLOG to be added to the SFD planet if you participate in SFD this year (and blog about FOSS…).

So let’s get started and happy SFD preparations!

PS: do check the SFD 2011 winners for inspiration and thanks again to Lemote and FSF for the prizes. http://www.softwarefreedomday.org/en/competition/winners-2011

• [1]: http://mail.sf-day.org/lists/listinfo/sfd-discuss
• [2]: http://planet.softwarefreedomday.org (language specific planets available through the language switcher)
• [3]: http://www.softwarefreedomday.org/en/blog
• [4]: http://www.softwarefreedomday.org/en/blog?format=feed&type=rss
• [5]: http://identi.ca/dfi/