We would like to wish all of you a happy new year and hope the best will happen to every one of us.

2014 is an important year for SFD and the Digital Freedom Foundation. We have now extended our celebrations to four in a year as the Free Software philosophy extends to more and more places. We have also merged one of our side activities, Greenboard, which is about building a totally Free and Open Source curriculum to meet the tremendous need for technology that everyone is facing and especially the unprivileged groups, at the lowest possible cost. While currently only available in Chinese (as it is where it is developed) we are slowly translating it into English.

So to summarize we will be celebrating the following events this year:

• Education Freedom Day: Saturday January 18th
• Hardware Freedom Day: Saturday March 15th
• Culture Freedom Day: Saturday May 17th
• Software Freedom Day: Saturday September 20th

You can of course find more information on the related websites or ask us questions through the appropriate mailing lists.

Last but not least, we are headed towards our tenth year of existence and this would not have been possible without you and without all the supporting organizations which have followed us around the years, namely Canonical, Google, Linode, the FSF and FSFE, Creative Commons, FreeBSD, Joomla!, the Open Clipart Library, Foundation Ceata, Linux Magazine, Linux Journal, Ubuntu User, Admin magazine and smart developer.

This year we will also try to raise more funds and hopefully hire someone to help us full time as it is starting to be a busy all-year-round activity. Hopefully this will make us more active and responsive to all the requests we are getting and better overall.

So thank you all and let's make 2014 unforgettable!

Digital Freedom Foundation is launching a new celebration around Free and Open Educational Resources called Education Freedom Day which will be celebrated on January 18th 2014 (Saturday). We really hope this celebration can provide a great introduction to the general public what Open Educational Resources (OER) is, its benefits and how vibrant your local community is.

Please help us to promote EFD by using our EFD countdown and banners. If you have contacts with either your local schools, colleges, universities or some open education projects please visit the EFD wiki, create your event page and register your event! If you have any question, please join and ask our EFD mailing list or IRC channel #efday @ Freenode.

Happy Education Freedom Day!

Our long term sponsor, Google has launched its Code-in 2013 program, an online contest to introduce 13-17 year old pre-university students to free and open source software development. The contest is similar to the Google Summer of Code program for older students in that it gives participants the opportunity to work with mentors from carefully chosen free and source software projects on real-world coding and related tasks like QA, documentation and more. Over the last 3 years over 1200 students from 71 countries have participated. We hope to expand the program this year and would appreciate your help and that of the members of your community to spread the word to girls around the world.

Bucharest, Romania and Hong Kong, China -- For its continuous and growing effort to spread awareness on Free Software among Romanian speakers with the occasion of the international days run by the Digital Freedom Foundation, Fundația Ceata gets acknowledged as supporting organization of Software Freedom Day near the date of this year's edition.

Date:September 21, 2013 (1:15pm to 6pm)

Registration starts at 1:15pm

Talks

• 1:45pm to 2:00pm   Welcoming speech by Graham Leach, Hong Kong Polytechnic University
  2::10pm to 2:55pm  Google
  3:05pm to 3:50pm   Libre Office
  3:50pm to 4:20pm   Break 30 mins
  4:20pm to 5:00pm   Nick Jones, Network Box R&D head
  5:00pm to 5:40pm : Drupal by Julien Mary
  5:50pm to 6:00pm : Closing speech and lucky draw by Michael Iannini

Exhibitors

• Digital Freedom Foundations
  Libre Office
  Blender movies
  Fedora

Workshops

• FOSS development
  OLPC
• GNU/Linux