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/

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.

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!