[Ossm-members] [Fwd: Software Freedom Day 2005]

[Ivan Stojmirov]

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Software Freedom Day 2005
Date: Sun, 24 Apr 2005 22:59:58 +0100
From: Henrik Nilsen Omma


Hello!

It's 2005 and we're back! We are writing first to registered team
leaders to let you know what we've been up to and our plans for 2005.


September 10th
-------------------

We decided to move the date back slightly for this year to allow more
schools to participate. Obviously, not everyone will be happy with the
new date (but you can't please everyone). As was the case last year, we
want to concentrate as much activity as possible on a single day for
maximum impact, but it is of course also possible to organise local
events in the days leading up to, or just after the main event.


Software Freedom International
-------------------------------------

In order to manage the logistics of the SFD event in a tidy way we have
set up a non-profit organisation as the official organiser. This will
allow us to take donations and enter into sponsorship contracts and to
order and ship materials using official accounts. We will also be able
to apply for tax-exempt status so that donations may be deductible in
future. To distinguish it from the event itself, we have called the
parent organisation 'Software Freedom International' (SFI).

Major decisions concerning SFD will be made by the SFI board of
directors, which is currently comprised of:

Henrik Nilsen Omma (President), of TheOpenCD project
Matt Oquist (Treasurer), GNSS
Phil Harper, of TheOpenCD project
Jules Sidenburg, of Oxford University
Frederick Noronha, Goa SFD Team
Sidsel Jensen, Copenhagen SFD Team

With time, we will increasingly draw board members from the global
community of teams. We are still planning on expanding the board with
one or two places, and will consider applications from existing team
leaders. So if you ran a successful event last year and would like to
help on the global level this year, please drop us a line. (The board
members do not receive payment for their services.)

As we grow there are other roles that could benefit from some volunteer
efforts too, like local (national or regional) coordinators, sponsorship
coordinator, wiki/website maintainers, media campaign people, etc. if
you have ideas for things we can do or things you can help with in this
regard, please drop us a line.


Sponsorship and Donations
--------------------------------

We are also pleased to announce our new (and first ever) primary
sponsor, Canonical Ltd., Most of you will know Canonical as the company
behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution (currently #1 on distrowatch).

We have agreed on a two-year primary sponsorship arrangement with
Canonical wich involves material support and mutual promotion. They will
produce and ship up to 15000 CDs to teams world-wide this year and will
server space and limited logistical support. Matt Oquist is currently in
Sydney where he is attending the Ubuntu Down-Under conference this week.
He'll be signing the final sponsorship papers and will give a
presentation about SFD.

We will also be seeking secondary and local sponsors to further increase
our impact on the day. This can be any company or organisation with
links to FOSS (or anyone really). We have set up a paypal account to
take general donations from groups and individuals.


Materials
-----------

Canonical Ltd. has pledged to supply up to 150 teams with up to 100 CD
packs containing professionally pressed FOSS CDs. We believe that a
single CD containing a selection of Windows-FOSS (TheOpenCD) and a small
bootable Linux Live CD (Ubuntu-lite) will serve as a perfect
introduction to novice FOSS-users. The exact selection of software is
still under consideration and the decision will be made in conjunction
with our main sponsor.


New website
---------------

Last year's website did its job, but only just. As many of you will
remember, the site was quite slow and a bit gloomy (I've certainly got
enough of the purple now). Thanks to our new sponsor we now have a
dedicated server with lots of disk space and bandwidth. We've set up a
Mambo CMS system with a new look. Any Mambo-experts out there are
welcome to contact us to help out with maintaining the site! The old
site can still be seen at www.sfd2004.org.

Unfortunately, in moving to new servers, we broke the old @sfd email
addresses, including the team leader emails, which is why I'm using the
original addresses to contact you now (sorry). Unless there is great
demand, we probably won't set up team leader addresses again, but will
instead set up mailing list and IRC channels (#sfd on freenode). Please
let us know if you have strong views on this.


Finally, I'd just like to thank you all for your effort so far and say
that I look forward to working with all of you this year :)

Best wishes,

    Henrik Nilsen Omma





-- 
Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free
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