On top of the badges we now have a multi-lingual countdown counter supporting all time zones. Currently twelve languages are supported (English, German, Portuguese, French, Khmer, Sinhalese, Persian, Korean, Spanish, Galician, Chinese simplified and traditional). Feel free to place one of the counters in your website or blog. It is very easy to add a new language should you need it and even documented.

Link to countdown usage page:
http://www.softwarefreedomday.org/en/participate/countdown
Link to translation howto:
http://wiki.softwarefreedomday.org/CountDown/
Link to promotion badges:
http://wiki.softwarefreedomday.org/Promote

A big thank you goes to all the translators who have helped us to create the necessary png files for each language!

Happy SFD preparations!

Since its launched a week ago, we already have 188 SFD events registered from over 60 countries.

Team packs are now READY to ship and the deadline to request for this excellent Schway is TOMORROW! If you plan to organize a Software Freedom Day (SFD) event this year, but haven’t registered yet, you should do it now! Schwag availability is subject to first come first served basis (200 packs in total) and each pack will include:

• 3 t-shirts
• a 2-meter long banner
• 20 stickers
• 10 tshirt transfer labels (make your own SFD tshirts)
• 3 DVDs (OpenDisc, FreeCulture and FreeDistro (PC-BSD ISO included) and Free BSD)
• 20 balloons
• a  flyer

Registration is very easy, you just need to :

• Create a wiki page of your event here, and then
• Submit your event information here

If you have any issue regarding registration, please:

• Read the create the team page howto or,
• Contact us via email: sfd-discuss(at)sf-day.org or IRC: #sfd @freenode server.

If you wonder what is SFD or how to organize or participate in a SFD event? Please go to our website and read our startguide.

If you have already registered your SFD event, you should receive your team pack in early September. All the best to your preparation!

Please help us to promote Software Freedom Day by placing a SFD web banner on your website / blog and link back to your SFD event page or softwarefreedomday.org front page.

This is with a great pleasure (and small delay) that we are announcing registration opening for SFD 2011! In fact some of the SFD team leaders have already started to create their wiki pages and participated in the soft opening and registration testing that we started 2 days ago. Most bugs should have been cleared out of the way and we remain available for any problem you may encounter through email or on IRC (#SFD on freenode). A special thanks goes to Fred, who wrote us this brand new registration script for 2011 and the many years to come!

We also want to particularly thank our sponsors who are making this possible, namely Canonical, Google, Nokia/Qt in China and Linode. We have also attracted more media sponsors this year (from 2 to 5 in total now) where we are running a A4/Letter size ad in the August/September edition for most (some are quarterly magazines). In no specific order those are Linux Magazine (long time partner), Linux Journal (yeah, welcome!), Ubuntu User, Admin Magazine and Smart Developer. And we are still in discussion with 2 or 3 other organizations.

Like last year there are about 10 days to goodies deadline (limited to the first 200 teams and Canonical is still providing Ubuntu CDs), so just go create a new team page under http://wiki.softwarefreedomday.org/2011 (not continent this year) and fill the registration form! In 2011 goodies will include tshirts, tshirt labels, banners, stickers, balloons and DVDs (OpenDisc, FreeCulture and FreeDistro).

Last but not least we want to thank all the new volunteers who have joined the SFD global marketing team and are helping with global tasks. One of the net outcome has been our new SFD logo for 2011 which we will keep moving forward (thank you David, Jeff and Maxus Singapore) and the multimedia DVD which we have finally managed to make (thank you Diego and Marcos). All artworks are available here and under a CC-BY license.

Please also help us to spread the words and promote Software Freedom Day by placing one of the banners here! And happy SFD preparations!

Do subscribe to the discuss mailing list if you haven’t yet, read SFD Planet (we also have Spanish, Portuguese and German – URLs need to be updated), read our blog to keep posted (or RSS feed to it) as well as check out the SFD 2010 winners for inspiration and thank you to Makerbot and FSF for the prizes.