Thanks to the community, the SFD countdown is now available in 15 languages which are: English- Catalan – Français – German – Chinese simplified – Persian – Portuguese – Arabic – Greek – Ukrainian – Estonian – Spanish – Serbian Cyrillic – Serbian Latin – Russian. 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! On top of placing this SFD countdown, you can also 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.

Happy SFD event preparation!

They're finally off! Yes, you read well, all the SFD team packs have left DFI office and are now on their way to your event. All registered teams before August 12 this year should start to receive the great stuff we have prepared for them. In total we packed and shipped about 200 packages together with our local community. DFI has been generous enough as every year to invite us for dinner that same day!

A big thank you goes to Google, Canonical, Linode, Free Software Foundation, FSFE, Linux Magazine, Ubuntu Users, Smart Developer, Admin magazine, Linux Journal, FreeBSD, and Joomla!. We are also pretty excited to have new FOSS projects doing their part to support and encourage SFD, such as Creative Commons and Open Clipart .

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!

And while we're 2 weeks within the opening of SFD 2012 registration a lot of things are happening. First we saw an amazing 100 teams registered from 47 countries! We are currently producing team packs for 200 SFD teams. The packs will be delivered to teams that registered on or before July 15th on a first come first served basis. If you haven't registered your SFD event yet, simply create your team page and complete the registration form. All information and links are of course available from SFD website.

Another good news is that three excellent proposals were received for the upcoming SFD Summit, we are currently reviewing those proposals and asking clarifications to the respective teams hopefully we can announce the location in the coming week!

We are about 3 months away from Software Freedom Day, it’s probably the right time to resume our marketing committee IRC meeting. It is a monthly meeting hosting on the 2nd Sunday (UTC 1400) of the month. You may use http://www.timeanddate.com/ to convert to your local time.

Our first meeting will be on July 8th (Sunday). Agenda can be found on http://wiki.softwarefreedomday.org/MarketingCommittee/Agenda We are open for anybody who is interested to help spread the word for SFD or FOSS!

If you are interested in marketing SFD, you should also join our marketing mailing list here.

First meeting schedule

Date: July 8th (Sunday)
Time: UTC 1400
Channel: sfd-marketing
Server: Freenode
Agenda: Here

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 under http://wiki.softwarefreedomday.org/2012 (/country/city for most) and complete the form on http://www.softwarefreedomday.org/cgi-bin/register.py. All information and links are of course available from SFD website.

As usual artworks are available under http://wiki.softwarefreedomday.org/Artwork and CC-BY licensed. Feel free to use, enhanced and eventually localize them.

I want 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!

The DFI Board

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: http://www.softwarefreedomday.org/en/competition/winners-2011

The above teams should be an inspiration to all SFD organizers and help you 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.

For more information please contact:

Frederic Muller
Software Freedom International President
info (at) sf-day.org
or visit our website at www.softwarefreedomday.org

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!