SoftwareFreedomDay

SoftwareFreedomDay

Status

Introduction

http://maitri.ubuntu.com/softwarefreedomday/templates/sfd2/images/sfd_05.jpg

Date: September 10th 2005

Software Freedom Day (SFD) is an independent project to promote general public awareness of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). Canonical, Ltd. is the new primary sponsor of SFD. This BOF concerns brainstorming about community building and SFD event organization. Read more at the SFD website.

Audience

This spec is not intended for a public audience; it will be used by the SFD organizers.

Rationale

SFD and Canonical share goals of public FOSS awareness and usage; Canonical is building LoCo teams, and SFD is building SFD teams. We should work together to maximize the impact and effectiveness of both groups.

Scope and Use Cases

SFD Organization Scope:

  • Providing online community tools
  • publishing guidelines, HOWTOs, key messages to describe SFD, do's and don’ts
  • providing a press kit
  • providing ISOs
  • providing materials (CDs, t-shirts, etc.) to sufficiently organized teams
  • recruiting volunteers (preferably regional coordinators, but also team leaders)

SFD Case studies:

Implementation Plan

  • We need to publish the discussed event ideas and other items on SFD website and/or wiki, probably in the form of a SoftwareFreedomDayStarterManual.

  • Publish criteria for which teams get CD packs / press kits / posters

    • Have >= 3 committed team members

    • Have confirmed venue
    • Have an event plan that will foster expectations of authenticity, quality, and professionalism for the software on the CDs
    • Confirm that they have read the guidelines by ticking a box (DOs and DON'Ts)
    • Make checkbox commitment to provide feedback after the event

      • teams which do provide feedback can possibly be rewarded with gear and/or extra materials for the next year...

  • Develop some policy to encourage sponsorship fairness ...people in some countries can't burn their own discs without a lot of trouble, and they should have a better shot at the sponsored discs.
  • Develop immediately recognizable 2-color logo and consistent style
  • Create a Press Kit:

    • Bios & pics

    • Single-sentence introduction to SFD, as in "SFD is a world-wide celebration of the quality and ideals of Free Software"
    • Single-paragraph description of SFD, such as

      • Software Freedom Day (http://softwarefreedomday.org/) was born when Matt Oquist approached Henrik Nilsen Omma and Phil Harper of TheOpenCD (http://theopencd.org/) project and proposed that they work together to coordinate volunteer teams around the world in publicly distributing Free Software on a given day. In 2004 SFD was celebrated on August 28th, and 20-30 volunteer teams around the globe (<list some countries>) distributed thousands of CDs with Free Software such as OpenOffice, Mozilla Firefox, and a bootable Linux demo CD. In 2005, SFD will be celebrated on September 10th, and Canonical, Ltd. (http://www.canonical.com/) will be supplying registered teams with CDs for distribution. SFD is organized by the non-profit organization Software Freedom International (Also at http://softwarefreedomday.org/), which can be contacted via email at <email address>.

    • Bulleted list of key messages, such as
      • Software Freedom is worth celebrating because it boosts the technical advances of developing countries, makes more powerful technology more accessible in education, and localizes the control of data and software features.
      • Free Software brings "power to the people" in a way that secretly coded software never can, because Free Software has no secret code. Only the code brings power, and secret code leads to centralized power. Free Software with visible code makes its power available to anyone who can understand the code, or who can hire someone else who does.
      • Free Software localizes software development economics while globalizing software development advances.
  • Provide guidelines for SFD teams to solicit local sponsorship.

  • Clearly publish positive focus of SFD organization (SFD is not a campaign against any people or companies; it is a campaign for FOSS and FOSS ideology) (See the SoftwareFreedomDayStarterManual Do-And-Do-Not list.)

  • We should make a structured plan for building the community running up to the event.
    • Consider having a weekly newsletter and/or blog that people can subscribe to.

    • Make a list of other organisations to contact and how to do it (like spreadfirefox and the OOo marketing team). More details are in the SFD wiki.

    • Ask people to blog about their preparations; set up a planet.sfd.org.

    • An analogue to http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/UbuntuWorldWide would be cool. (I just spoke with jdub about this and he'll send his scripts. He said the KDE folks have a better solution in which we might be interested. --MattOquist)

    • Statistics page showing the number of teams, members, donations to date (or number of CDs we can provide), etc. to build excitement.

    • Invite LoCo teams to form SFD teams

  • Plan for additional material to support local events, like posters (physical? PDF/SVG/Gimp?)
    • Make flier with bulleted talking-points on the front and "more info"/contact info on the back
    • Make the flier useful even after SFD
  • Donations drive - The more funds we have, the more materials we can provide to teams in addition to CDs, including T-shirts, balloons, stickers, and tattoos. Can we come up with something similar to the Spreadfirefox donations campaign? What can we promise in return for their donations?

  • Invite SFD teams to hook up with or form Ubuntu LoCo teams, which could help to follow-up with people who receive the SFD CD packs.

  • Contest for teams: submit post-SFD reports & pics (by a deadline) and possibly receive a prize (TBD) or be featured (on our site and in post-SFD press releases) as a successful team.

    • Sponsored prizes? HP, Dell, ThinkGeek, Samsung, IBM, Mozilla.org, MozSource

    • We can hold a community vote for:
      1. coolest event pics
      2. most creative event idea
      3. best mascot/costume
      4. best coverage in local media
      5. best SFD video
      6. best SFD audio
      7. etc...
    • Special/other prizes:
      1. most reporting SFD teams in a city (obviously impossible for smaller cities, but that's how it goes)
        • We maybe need some requirements about what they have to do.
        • This might be too difficult to determine; what counts as a single city?
        • Do we have alternative ideas to encourage team-planting by coordinators?
      2. most people in one picture (with visible SFD paraphernalia in the shot)
      3. most blog entries leading up to the event (?)
      4. team and city(?) with most contact info submissions *by visitors* during SFD
      5. etc...

Data Preservation and Migration

Existing guidelines, etc. from 2004 will be updated and published on the new SFD site. (This is already done; see SoftwareFreedomDayStarterManual.)

User Interface Requirements

People visiting the SFD website should easily find the SoftwareFreedomDayStarterManual (see above) to:

  • find out how they can help
  • sign up to lead a team
  • find a team to join
  • submit a post-event report

UbuntuDownUnder/BOFs/SoftwareFreedomDay (last edited 2008-08-06 16:34:34 by localhost)