Software Freedom International is reaching out to Software Freedom Day team leaders and would like to gather as much feedback as possible to improve our support. Whether you have organized an SFD event in 2010 or the years before, with or without registering, we need your participation. There are 31 questions and it should take you about 5-8 minutes. We’re really hoping to learn a lot from this and therefore count on you. The survey is accessible here and powered by LimeSurvey. We’ll keep it running probably until around end of the year and publish the results afterwards, so please let your team leaders know about it.
Tag: SFD
SFD’10 competition is on!
All organizing teams of a Software Freedom Day 2010 event are invited to submit their event report in order to participate in the Best SFD Event Competition 2010 . There is a bit more than two weeks left so you should start to worry a little if you haven’t joined the competition yet! We went to the extra mile this year to bring you amazing prizes (for the winning teams that is) and are quite proud to be able to offer in partnership with our sponsors the Open Source (GPL’ed) Makerbot 3D printers and the book Free Software Free Society: selected essays by Richard M. Stallman signed by the author himself! 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 October 31st 1200UTC and winning teams will hopefully be announcement somewhere around mid December the latest. And of course the submission link itself which I shouldn’t forget to remind you about is at http://cgi.softwarefreedomday.org/event_report.html. Good luck to all!
Software Freedom Day 2010 – Shantou chapter
Thanks to the good work from SFDChina, there were near 60 Software Freedom Day events hosted in different cities around China this year! Some events had to be postponed either a day earlier or a day later due to Nanking Massacre Memorial Day conflicting date. Fred and I celebrated the D-day by joining forces with the one hosted by Shantou University.
As mentioned in my previous post, the event was organized by the Linux Association from Shantou University (STU). It started in the morning with an outdoor exhibition to demonstrate Free Software and followed with presentations in the evening. Fred gave an overview on why Software Freedom matters, a quick history review of Free and Open Source Software and talked about how the audience could get involved and contribute to the community. Then I introduced some cool Free Software that I use everyday and demonstrated how FOSS helped me to get things done. Unlike other events I have been involved with in China, we had the pleasure to talk to very active spectators asking plenty of questions such as:
- How can Free Software sustain without any financial support from companies?
- Which field / area do GNU/Linux systems apply to?
- Knowing that Free Software is so cool, why the market share is so little in China?
- How can we increase the market share of Free Software in China?
- What are the benefits to use GNU/Linux systems and Free Software in terms of software development?
- Do you think Free software will dominate the world market in the future?
The event ended with some great performances given by two other STU associations, namely the Guitar Players Associations and the Magicians Associations. This was totally in line with the purpose of SFD which is to make the day as constructive and fun as possible! We totally enjoyed our Software Freedom Day, how about you?
SFD 2010 registration is open!
As a board member of Software Freedom International (and Secretary), it is with great pleasure to announce that Software Freedom Day 2010 registration is now OPEN!
For its 7th inception, the team at Software Freedom Day has finally opened registration for SFD 2010 teams to get free goodies to prepare their event. For those not familiar with SFD, it’s an annual event happening on the third Saturday of September (September 18th this year) which purpose is to reach out to the public to educate, discuss and demonstrate the virtues and benefits of Free Software. With around 800 locally managed events in 2009, SFI (the non-profit organization behind SFD) hopes to reach more than a thousand teams this year and hundreds of thousands of people. Indeed within less than 24 hours, there are already over 100 teams registered!
I personally started to get involved in Software Freedom Day since 2007 when I was the Vice President of Beijing Linux User Group. Organizer and winner of the Best 2007 Event Competition in 2007, I have then been involved in three events in 2008, two in Beijing and one in Qingdao. In 2009, supporting 86 events in China as well as a founding member organization of the SFDChina.org. Since, I have also been helping Software Freedom International to ship all the goodies worldwide, while making funny videos of it. I have to say it’s a great fun to organize and join all those SFD events! So will you also participate and join this passionate community in their world domination effort?
Hello Planet GNOME
As a new poster on Planet GNOME I suppose presentations are in order: my main contributions to GNOME are to try to grow the Asian community and I do this by taking part in the GNOME.Asia Summit organization since its inception in 2008 in Beijing. Last year I actually even gave some talks at the Vietnamese chapter in Ho Chi Minh. Together with my friend Emily Chen we also started a GNOME User Group in Beijing after the first Summit end of 2008 and we do a lot of advocacy to get young Chinese students to take over some Gnome projects.
We’re actually in the middle of the call for host for the 2010 edition and you can find my post about the topic right here. So if anyone in Asia is interested to take up the challenge and be the lead organizer of a great Open Source technical conference showcasing GNOME technologies this is the chance. Note that the whole GNOME.Asia Summit committee will be behind you and we’re now strong of two successful years experience. So please do help spread the word.
I am also part of the localization team of a few GNOME projects especially the educational ones like GComrpis and Rur-ple. I spent a lot of time building a total FOSS solution for schools that included the OS with different educational apps for teaching and learning, tutorials for teachers, training and textbook for students. Of course we use a lot of GNOME and GNOME apps in the solution.
And when not doing GNOME things, I actually also happen to be the President of the (famous!) Beijing LUG (should you be in town please do contact me), on the board of Software Freedom International and very much involved with women in technology and students open source groups.
I hope that by now you have a better idea of who I am and should you have any idea on how to strengthen the Asian GNOME community please do get in touch. Also feel free to browse my previous post to get a better idea of the other things I’m involved with.