[GNUz] [Fwd: [SFD-discuss] Software Freedom Day 2008!]

[Rik Tindall]

-------- Original Message --------
Date: Sun, 13 Apr 2008 18:28:07 +1000
From: Pia Waugh <pia at softwarefreedomday.org>
To: SFD discussion list <sfd-discuss at sf-day.org>

Hi everyone!

The time has come to start planning your Software Freedom Day event for 
2008! We will be opening registrations in mid May and increasing the 
number of team packs (shirts, CDs, balloons and such) to 300, so make 
sure you keep an eye out and register as soon as you can! We have a new 
board with new members (details at http://softwarefreedomday.org/sfi). A 
warm welcome to Fred and Peter!
This years event will be September 20th, 2008 (please ignore the header 
of the website, it will be changed as soon as possible).

Last years event
================

Last year we had an amazing event, with over 330 teams from over 90 
countries. There were around 3000 participants reaching over 40,000 
members of the public. Around 40,000 FOSS CDs were handed out, including 
Ubuntu, the Open CD, Mandriva, Fedora, Kubuntu, Debian, Suse, Knoppix, 
and more!

The SFD events including installations of FOSS, demonstrations, 
conferences, presentations, radio, courses, some even used the day to 
collect food for disadvantaged families! The three events that won "best 
2007 SFD event" were FOSS Nepal Community, SFD Nicaragua 2007 Team & 
Beijing Software Freedom Day (China). Congratulations all! Their event 
reports can be found here 
http://softwarefreedomday.org/Competition2007/Winners.

Last year a lot of universities participated, however some schools also 
got involved, which was great to see. Loads of user groups always get 
involved to help get the word out about Software Freedom. There was 
excellent media coverage from many teams in many languages so great job 
everyone!

Planning
========

The Software Freedom International team have been getting everything on 
track for Software Freedom Day 2008. Firstly thank you to you all for 
your great ideas and feedback from last year. It has helped us create a 
plan for this year which should see Software Freedom Day grow even more, 
particularly in the education sector. We will be providing more 
resources to teams, including a DVD with video and presentation content 
that teams can use or mashup on the day. We'll also be providing the 
OpenDisc (the new Open CD project) and more resources to teams such as 
artwork, templates and other useful resources. We hope that you all put 
stuff on the wiki to share with other teams and start emailing the list 
with your ideas and lessons learnt.

We are hoping to have over 500 teams participate in Software Freedom Day 
2008, and we should all try to reach a grand total of 100,000 members of 
the public! Start thinking about what is the most appropriate way to 
take Software Freedom to your community. Perhaps it is a stall at a 
festival, perhaps a computer literacy course using FOSS, perhaps some 
presentations at a local school or university. Get ideas for your SFD 
event planning from the Start Guide here
http://softwarefreedomday.org/StartGuide.

As per an email late last year, we are keen to get more translations of 
SFD content and information. We are in the process of setting up some
infrastructure to facilitate this so stay tuned for more information 
about translations.

New infrastructure
==================

We are in the process of setting up new infrastructure as we migrate to 
a new hosting environment donated by Linode (http://linode.com/). This 
will increase our control over the SFD website and mailing lists such 
that we can avoid downtime, and also add new functionality. In the short 
term we will be doing a site redesign, a moin moin upgrade (the wiki), 
and some mailing list migration. We'll make sure this is as seamless as 
possible for you all.

We are going to make reporting and registering much easier this year, 
with a few changes including a world map as the mechanism to find events 
rather than a list by continent. This will mean team pages will be
http://softwarefreedomday.org/<teamname> rather than a really long URL 
as has been the case in the past. Thanks to everyone for their 
suggestions on this!

We'll also be adding a "planet" to SFD, to aggregate blogs from our 
community, a new online shop and more to be announced soon.

Thanks
======

Thank you to last years sponsors, to the rest of the SFI board, and 
finally, thank you to you all for helping take Software Freedom to the 
world! We are looking forward to seeing what teams come up with for next 
year, and we will be supporting you all as much as we can!

Cheers,
Pia

-- 
Software Freedom Day 2007                   http://softwarefreedomday.org/
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