"What are we doing today Brain? Taking over the world like we always do."
The Software Freedom International Board are currently judging the best SFD07 competition entries, and there is a great video about the Mt Gambier Software Freedom Day event which made it to WIN news in Australia. Nice one to Peter and the team there 🙂
The winners of the SFD07 competition will be announced in November.
Jeff and I are now just over halfway through our national “Meet the Open Source Industry” roadshow.
It has been an excellent turn out in most cities, with great numbers in Brisbane, Darwin and Adelaide. Canberra wasn’t as well attended as we accidentally planned the event the morning after the long weekend, and Sydney was a little low on numbers due to over-busy Sydney people being slackers. 🙂
Tomorrow is the Perth event, and then next week is Melbourne and Hobart, all of which are looking great. Soon, we’ll publish slides from the roadshow including the Open Source companies we introduced all around the country!
Today is the Open Source Western Australia Symposium, a collaboration between the Department of Industry and Resources and the Western Australian Supercomputer Program. I helped them with some of their speakers and WASP have also created a good relationship with the Perth Linux User Group, which is cool. WASP even ran the Perth Software Freedom Day event.
Today they are also announcing the first major research project into the use of FOSS in the Western Australian Government and market, based on the national AGIMO survey into the use of FOSS in Federal Government earlier this year. Waugh Partners is running the survey and assisting with the analysis, which we are pretty excited about.
So the short of it is there is a lot happening, and we need to blog more regularly (hint, hint Jeff) 🙂
Check out the Software Freedom Day map below for all the teams participating this year! Over 300 now and still registering! Rock on everyone! Software Freedom Day is one week away on September the 15th.
After some annoying issues, we finally have the balloons and stickers being shipped out to all the SFD teams. Check them out below 🙂 I’m a little disappointed with the stickers, but all in all they look great! All teams will be getting about 20 of both. Next year we’ll be getting loads more!
Phil Harper has just released the SFD07 version of The Open CD, a great FOSS CD with software for Windows. Nice work Phil! SFD teams, or even just interested individuals can download and burn it for SFD or any other useful outreach event 🙂
The artwork (a nice black and white label) is included in the iso.
A few days ago I did a short 1 hour talk on FOSS for about 30 IT teachers in Sydney. It was a lot of fun and it reminded me how spending just a little time can have such a great effect! Finding people who are keen to hear about and who can really use FOSS really helps the chances of success in your message having an impact. Thus far the people I’ve found to be most open to hearing about FOSS and also the concepts of Software Freedom, Free Knowledge and a digital democracy are teachers, activists, people in the NGO/non-profit sector and students. Politicians are also good to chat to, and there is a growing community of FOSS saavy lawyers too.
Any opportunity you get to talk to these people can often have a great flow on effect to their spheres of influence. I’ve had many occasions where someone I spoke to comes back to me months or years later to help them take it further, or to assist in some great scheme they’ve created with others.
It has been flat out recently. Jeff and I are working hard and getting some great new work (more news to come!), FOSS is really taking off in Australia in Government, corporate and education, and apart from being so flat out, life is really good 🙂
Software Freedom Day is only 5 weeks away, and the website (which is hosted by Canonical) is down and has been for 2 days. Terrible timing! We expect it to be back up soon and it isn’t slowing down our shipment or other plans, but we’ve no way to let the teams know that yet.
I’ve just released a press release on SFD 2007. If people could follow the link and repost this as far and wide as they can (and translations very welcome!) that would be awesome! Below is a taste 🙂
September 15th marks Software Freedom Day, the world’s largest celebration and outreach effort about why transparent and sustainable technologies like Free & Open Source Software are so important. Community groups in more than 80 countries organise local activities and programs on Software Freedom Day to educate the wider public about free software: what it is, how it works and its relationship to human rights and sustainability. We already have over 140 teams around the world registered: join them in spreading the word! Registrations for Software Freedom Day teams that want to receive a free SFD team pack close in two weeks, so register now!
Full press release available here! Only two months away, time for everyone to get their skates on!
This is too cool. Chris Yeoh has created a virtual SFD 2007 tshirt based on the real ones in Second Life and people can pick them up online. Nice work Chris!
I love our community 🙂
I forgot to show off our new sticker design. Kudos to Phil Harper who does most of our artwork. Great work Phil!
Note: the real sticker artwork also has the date on it 🙂
I’ve been working on putting up the online Software Freedom Day shop, which at this point includes tshirts for the event and CD packs of The Open CD. Teams running SFD events (that register prior to the 31st July) get a 50% discount so spread the word! 🙂
We also have more and better free schwag for teams than ever before including balloons, CDs, shirts, stickers and more. We also have more sponsors than ever before but more on than soon 🙂
We already have 125 teams registered from all around the world and it is only July! This year is looking to be huge!
More information soon to come 🙂 Comments on the shirt design are welcome.
