Since October 2011 the SFI board has taken a few major decisions regarding its own future. First, all board members have expressed interest to remain on the board and therefore the same team will preside over SFI in 2012. As president for two consecutive years now I believe stability among the board is paramount to get things done and is something with which we have struggled a bit with in the past.
Stability should allow us to push our celebration and advocacy concepts to new heights. In order to reach those goals we had to widen the scope of our possible actions by changing our bylaws and adding a DBA (doing-business-as) name to our official organization registration. While the bylaws'final wording is still under review SFI has decided to operate under the name of Digital Freedom International. It is without a doubt that the Free Software movement has spread to new territories beyond the realm of software itself but intimately linked and equally important to Free Software. SFI, or from now on DFI, and the teams celebrating SFD have gradually taken note of this phenomenon over the previous years and need to adopt new strategies as both the audience and the subject matters are very spread in nature.
End of 2011 saw the SFI board validating an ambitious plan for 2012 and 2013 and this plan begins with our new (DBA) name: Digital Freedom International.

Let's wish us all the best in these new adventures!

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!

Just wanted to let everyone knows that we have been able to add two new languages to the SFD Countdown: Spanish and Galician. You can find all the information to create the countdown in your own language here and the full usage manual here. Thank you for everyone participating in making SFD 2011 what it is!

So for the pleasure of the eyes now:

We have now about 4 weeks left to SFD and we wanted to update everyone on all the great things which are happening this year.

We have been working hard on SFD promotion to provide easy ways to advertise and attract people to your events. On top of the badges we showcased about 2 weeks ago we now have a multi-lingual countdown counter supporting all time zones. Currently nine languages are supported (English, German, Portuguese, French, Khmer, Sinhalese, Persian, Chinese simplified and traditional). 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

Since we are talking about promotion we would like to thank our media partners as we have a few new ones this year, and we have kept the old ones too. In no specific order those publications will advertise for SFD this month or the next: Linux Magazine, Linux Journal, Ubuntu Users, Admin magazine and Smart Developer. It is also important to thank our corporate sponsors who have followed us for quite a few years now and with whom we wouldn't be able to send those team packs or have our website up and running: Canonical, Google, Qt/Nokia and Linode. And then we have the people from other Free and Open Source projects joining the ranks of organizations celebrating SFD such as the FSF, the FSFE and newly stepping in this year, FreeBSD and Joomla! We sincerely hope this list will grow longer as everyone sees us working together on providing speakers, joining communities and providing more content to help raise the quality of all SFD events.

So considering the press coverage and all the promotional efforts we're working on you should expect visitors to start looking for information and events in your area. It is very important to update your team wiki page providing at least an idea about:

• Your event location
• How to contact you or your group
• Date and time of your event
• Any more information such as schedule, registration info if any, etc will of course be very helpful to convince people to drop by.

Another important point to highlight is that we are promoting Software Freedom regardless of the operating system being used and that means this freedom should be promoted on all fronts included on Free OSes. In order to help you out when distributing non-free GNU/Linux distributions and make this information process easy we have written a notice to be inserted into such CD/DVDs. The purpose is to let people know to be careful with what they are installing (or buying) even when using GNU/Linux. The notice (together with an odf document to print 4 per sheet) can be found here:
http://wiki.softwarefreedomday.org/Resources/CdNotice
We strongly ask for team organizers to use this notice when distributing non-free GNU/Linux distributions (translations available in Portuguese and Spanish).

Also to help you with planning we have set up a few important pages where you can find logos, slides, videos, templates, all source files of whatever you can find on the wiki and plenty of more links. Head to http://wiki.softwarefreedomday.org/Marketing to find a list of those. We will continue working on providing more slides and ideas in the coming weeks.

Another helping factor this year is that we have finally started to translate our main website (the www one - we started with the wiki guides last year). All this work has been done by the SFD community and is progressing slowly. Hopefully we will get more done as we get closer to SFD. The planets have also been upgraded and it is now very easy to switch from one available language to another (note that not all languages have planet, default is English).

And since we are talking about translations we would also like to point out that we have launched 2 new mailing lists this year to complete the existing Spanish one: one in Portuguese and one in Russian. Obviously if you're speaking one of those 3 languages it's probably worth subscribing and saying hi there! We will continue to speak English though (haven't found the language learning pill yet) and provide updates in that language. And for all of your team participants we also urge you to subscribe to at least sfd-announce and sfd-discuss mailing list. Mailing list info page is here:
http://mail.sf-day.org/lists/listinfo

Should you have any question either pop up on our irc channels (#sfd for English or #sfd-es for Spanish) or contact us.

Thank you all and happy SFD preparations!

SFI Board

While we haven't taken the time to blog much these past few weeks a lot of things happened and we will try to get back to that in upcoming posts. So right now we believe the important news is that all "team packs" have been shipped earlier this week both on SFI side and on Canonical side. All registered teams before August 2nd this year should start to receive the great stuff we have prepared for them. At SFI we are very pleased with all the feedback we received from both the team survey and from the SFD Marketing team and also from our sponsors and partners support which have made this possible. In total we packed and shipped almost 230 packages together with our local community. SFI has been generous enough as every year to invite us for dinner that same day!

A big thank you goes to Canonical for the CDs of course but also to Google, Qt/Nokia, Linux Magazine, Ubuntu Users, Smart Developer, Admin magazine and Linux Journal who has joined us this year. We are also pretty excited to have new FOSS projects doing their part to support and encourage SFD, such as FreeBSD and Joomla!.

For those who missed the deadline, subscribe to our announce or discuss mailing lists to get notified next year and rush to our artwork page to download all the source files and produce your own goodies!

HAPPY PREPARATIONS TO ALL!

Software Freedom Day 2010 Best Event Competition result announcements: Africa, Asia and Australia under the spotlights!

Hudson, New Hampshire (July 21, 2011) - Software Freedom International is proud to announce the  SFD 2010 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, 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 Makerbot, a private company pushing the concept of Free Software to physical media and making an fully open source 3D printer.

Among the 40 submissions we have received the three teams that came out as outstanding organizers and promoters of Software Freedom in 2010 are spread over 3 different continents. We would like to name in no specific order:

• SFD team Melbourne, Australia
• SFD team Yaoundé QV, Cameroon team
• SFD team SPCF-CITE, Angeles City, Philippines

2011 is bringing a lot of changes in SFD and the way we do things. One of the most significant change has been that we are starting to rely on the community at large to get things done (rather than let the SFI board handle all the details). This has resulted in a brand new logo designed by Jeff Lim and his associated company, Maxus Media Singapore. We usually don't plug in companies for which we work for community work, but Maxus Media happens to be a design company, Jeff a professional in his field and you can feel it in this new logo. At SFI Board we are very excited to have a logo clearly identifying Software Freedom Day and making us stand out while keeping our existing design specificities (the sun and the hill). For more background information on the logo itself and how we got there the marketing mailing list thread is a good read. Should you want to download the logo source files our wiki is the place to get them. Jeff and Maxus Media have been kind enough to agree to a free software license with attribution (CC-BY) to SFD so just feel free to share, adapt it to your needs and use it!

As a side note the 2011 wiki is ready to let you create your team page. This year we won't use any continent category and would like to ask everyone to create a dedicated team page under the city the event is happening at, in order to let potential other teams have a link on the city page. Should you have any problem with the wiki page creation you can either email the SFD discuss mailing list or ping us on our IRC channel (#sfd on Freenode.net). Official registration with a marker on our now famous map and the option to get free goodies will open shortly. Stay tuned!