Tag: SFD

SFD 2011 Competition Winners

Posted on by Pockey Lam

Digital Freedom International is one more time very proud to announce the SFD 2011 best event competition results. Software Freedom Day (SFD) is a worldwide celebration of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) with the goal of educating the public about the existence and the benefits of using FOSS in education, in government, at home and in business.

The SFD Best Event Competition is an international recognition of the efforts made by individual organizing teams in regards to spreading the importance of Software Freedom and reaching out to the relevant groups of people in their area. Each year three teams are chosen and the awards given to those teams are meant to help them further in their tasks for the years to come.

This year again, two leading organizations from the Free and Open Source Software movements have joined us to reward those exceptional achievers: the Free Software Foundation, the non-profit organization behind the Free Software movement, and Lemote, a private company making PCs running only Free Software from the BIOS to the drivers and the operating system as well.

Among the 50 submissions we have received the three teams that came out as outstanding organizers and promoters of Software Freedom in 2011 will be known by some of you for having organized SFD in the past (and some even won that same competition in the past). We would like to name in no specific order:

  • SFD team 8layertech/SFD.PH, Philippines
  • SFD team CP-Union, Philippines
  • SFD team IEEE ENIS Student Branch, Tunisia

As a general comment we were very pleased to see a higher quality of most events participating in the competition and would also like to mention some entries which didn’t make it in the top 3 but definitely deserve to be mentioned:

  • Palestine Software Freedom Day
  • Bluepoint Linux User Elite
  • Algeria Software Freedom Day

Congratulations to all!

Full details available here.

The above teams should be an inspiration to all SFD organizers and help SFD organizers to prepare for SFD 2012 which will happen on Saturday September 15th this year.

About DFI – Digital Freedom International is the non-profit organization at the origin of Software Freedom Day. DFI handles sponsorship contracts, official team registrations, sending out schwags to teams, the annual Best SFD Event Competition and many other things.

SFD Countdown ready!

Posted on by Pockey Lam

Celebrate SFD with us on September 15! The SFD countdown is ready for usage in English. We are therefore informing translators of 2011 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: http://wiki.softwarefreedomday.org/CountDown.

For those who already want to add the countdown on their page/blog/website the code is almost the same as last year (we’ve chosen a smaller size image this 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=“http://www.softwarefreedomday.org/countdown/banner1-UTC+2-en.png” border=”0″ width=”160″ height=”90″ alt=”Celebrate SFD with us on September 15!”></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!

Call for proposals to host SFD Summit 2012

Posted on by Pockey Lam

Digital Freedom International (Aka Software Freedom International) is proud to announce it will start co-organizing Software Freedom Days under the name of SFD Summit with one local team each year starting this year, and therefore we are inviting local organizers to submit proposals to host our upcoming and first SFD Summit around September 15th 2012.

The purpose of co-organizing such an event is to raise the profile of our celebrations while bringing a public space for discussions about the future of our movement. Over the past two years DFI/SFI has been through important changes in its governance such as expending community involvement through various committees, tightening our budget to remain cash positive, surveying SFD organizers and enhancing the team pack to enable teams to reuse the materials they receive, just to name a few of our efforts. It is now time to raise collaboration efficiency by getting together!

While this will be the first occurrence of a SFD Summit we are still very open on the details and expect proposals to enhance our views on the matter. Our current vision is to initially organize a great local SFD bringing in international speakers and attracting both sponsors and media attention, thus boosting the reputation and influence of the selected local organizer. Furthermore an extra day or two should be planned to work on the year ahead, programs and actions which could be run under the DFI umbrella and status updates on ongoing activities such as software development, infrastructure, marketing and fund raising campaigns.

If you are interested in hosting the upcoming SFD Summit in September 2012 please submit a formal proposal to board (at) softwarefreedomday (dot) org before July 1, 2012 Sunday UTC 2359. The proposal should address all of the relevant topics listed below:

  • Introduction of the country / city / organizer – why is this a good choice?
  • Recommended venues and logistics
  • Internet access
  • Accommodation choices
  • Local 1 day tour
  • Local community / government / industry support
  • Detail budget estimation and potential local sponsors

The event is recommended to run for at least 2 days in mid September 2012, with a combination of parallel tracks (at least 2 tracks). The planning sessions for SFD contributors should not conflict with other SFD sessions. Other key points which will be taken into account when choosing a proposal, are listed on the Requirement List page . Please check it out when putting together your proposal and feel free to contact sfd-discuss mailing list (or the board) if you have any further question. Also note that all profits from the summit will go to the DFI to further help our actions. We are looking forward to receive your proposals!

SFD’11 Competition is on!

Posted on by Pockey Lam

All organizing teams of a Software Freedom Day 2011 event are invited to submit their event report in order to participate in the Best SFD Event Competition 2011.

For the winning teams we have very amazing prizes! We are very proud to be able to offer in partnership with our sponsors, Lemote, a manufacturer of MIPS computers using only free software and free drivers. Lemote will provide 3 Yeeloong netbooks for the winners of 2011. Besides, the Free Software Foundation will be providing again Richard Stallman Essays and Richard will sign the book himself for the 2nd year. Big thank you to Lemote and the Free Software Foundation.

For the 2011 competition, three teams will be selected as usual by the Software Freedom International board and reading previous years winning entries should give you some inspiration (this was a free tip!).

Submission deadline is February 16th, 2011 2012 (UTC 0500) and the winning teams will be announced in early April the latest. And of course the submission link itself which I shouldn’t forget to remind you about is at http://www.softwarefreedomday.org/cgi-bin/report.py . Join the competition now and good luck to all!

PS: We are very concerned about SOPA and have joined the strike as many others. SFD website will come back from the dark on 19th January.

SFD around the corner!

Posted on by Pockey Lam
SFD 2011 worldwide map, over 430 SFD teams registered!
SFD 2011 worldwide map: 442 SFD teams from 86 countries registered!

2011 Software Freedom Day is approaching, are you ready yet?

To add to the collection of our Software Freedom Day music library (yeah we can call it a library now, we have two) we have another song named Free, A Song For Software Freedom to complement the excellent SFD song “Celebrate Software Freedom Day”. Both songs are licensed under CC-BY-SA, so you should feel free to share it with your friends especially during the Software Freedom Day! A special thanks to Erwin Galang, Meric Mara, Deng Silorio and Karl Ramirez for the composition of those two very cool SFD songs!

And since we are discussing the day itself please do document your event, use the #softwarefreedomday tag, upload photos, make movies, blog, tweet (on identica of course!) and get ready for the SFD 2011 competition. While we haven’t made any formal announcement yet we have some pretty exciting gifts again this year which we are sure will please all your team. Stay tuned!