It is with great pleasure that we are announcing Document Freedom Day celebration. As usual the event is celebrated on the last Wednesday of March (March 29th) and a few teams have already celebrated earlier such as people in Taiwan!

Due to the late announcement we are thinking to give people 1 more month to prepare for the event and run it on Wednesday April 26th!

Make sure you mention the date you're running the event on your wiki page.

We've migrated most of the content from the FSFE website to ours but plan on filling up the wikis as we have done with other events to provide tips & tricks for the years to come.

We would also like to thank our sponsors Google and Freiheit who have always back us up and deserve a big thank you for that!

So without further ado celebrate Document Freedom Day fully and enjoy every moment of it!

And today is the 13th edition of Software Freedom Day! We wish you all a great day talking to people and discovering (or making them discovery) the benefits and joys of running Free Software. As usual we have a map where you can find all the events in your area. Should you just discover about SFD today and want to organize an event it is never too late. While the date is global, each team has the freedom to run the event at a date that is convenient in their area. We (in Cambodia) are running our event on November 26 due to university schedule, other conferences and religious holidays conflicting.

So hopefully you'll get hooked just like us and start a new journey into the world of learning, sharing and contributing to your needs!

Happy Software Freedom Day to all of us!

September is the Software Freedom Day month (among other things) since 2005 (SFD 2004 was in August) and this year is no exception! As of last night we have a total of 58 events in 34 countries, with only 42 fully registered (you can see the location on our famous SFD map). There is always a delay between wiki page creation (which includes the plan, speakers, date and location) and the registration which ask organizers to specify where the event will happen.

What to expect from most events? Well Software Freedom Day is really an event to introduce Free and Open Source Software to newcomers and show them all the cool things which can be done using FOSS. While we have a resource page on our wiki to discuss about the various topics which can be presented we let each team decide how to organize their events. Usually events go through FOSS migration or how to gradually switch from proprietary software to FOSS ones starting by switching common applications such as email clients, office applications or other daily used tools. Once all this is working fine an Operating System migration is thinkable. Of course you will always have that application that has no GNU/Linux/BSD equivalent and it is always a pain. Among the various solutions you can either use a virtual machine inside your Free Operating System (but it will usually require extra RAM), dual boot or try Wine/Crossover. There is always the possibility to keep an extra machine just for that too.

Then you have all the more exciting topics about specific tasks or applications which are fully FOSS compliants. Among many Blender and its various projects are probably the more eye catching ones. You also have Inkscape and GIMP for the digital graphists. Then you have projects such as Open Street Map which everyone can make use of and contribute to, or web oriented application such as web servers, web analytics, content management software, configuration application for server such as Vagrant or Ansible, programming language and fun stuff like PyWeek or also educational applications and distributions to get your kids started.

And the list goes on... and then there are the social parts of the events where you meet people and do things together. We've had many variations of that over the years and we believe the 2016 edition will be no exception. What can you expect? Best is to attend and see for yourself.

And for the one still wondering if they have time to prepare for September 17, the simple answer is SURE!. You can start reading our StartGuide to get familiar with what to do, and then talk to other FOSS members of your community.

So don't forget to put our countdown on your sites or blogs and see you all on September 17!

Software Freedom Day is celebrated all around the world and as usual our community helps us to provide marketing materials in their specific languages. While the wiki is rather simple to translate, the Countdown remains a bit more complicated and time consuming to localize. One needs to edit the SVG file and generate roughly a 100 pictures, then upload them to the wiki.

Still this doesn't scare the SFD teams around the world and we are happy to announce two more languages are ready to be used: French and Chinese!

So should you need to use one of those two languages you can simply use the following code to display the countdown on your website or blog:

Happy SFD to all!

Update: and we now have German too. Just add the following if that is the one you want!

The Digital Freedom Foundation is very happy to announce that registration of its thirteenth edition of Software Freedom Day has just opened. While the wiki has been back online for about a week we were still lagging on the registration. Fear no more, it is now fixed and you can all register your events!

On the bright side we have a newly configured server and brand new websites for SFD and DFF. Other sites and efforts are on the way.

On the sponsorship side we are keeping the same organizations for SFD, Google being our major sponsor, Linode and Canonical helping us on the infrastructure sides. Full details are available on this page.

We would like to point out a new additional sponsor for DFD in the name of Freiheit this year (from our perspective).

So as usual registration happens after you have created your event page on the wiki. We have an exhaustive guide here at http://wiki.softwarefreedomday.org/StartGuide for newcomers and for the others who need help, the SFD-Discuss mailing list is probably the best place to get prompt support.

So get ready to celebrate and happy preparations to all!

Update: as we were told by the FSFE we forgot to mention SFD's date! So just in case you didn't know, Software Freedom Day is happening on Saturday 17th, 2016! Note also that we have made all our web pages including the wiki responsive. Not bad for 2016, no? ;-)