SFD in Kiel (Germany) shows great interest in Free Software

Our SFD is over since about 7 hours. We had around 30 visitors. I am VERY pleased with the result. Last year there were 20 visitors altogether, this year we had 30 nearly the whole day. There was a lot of curiosity about what free software was. Many of the scepticism that some had could be resolved.

Our planning and the location was much better than last year. This year we could use the  rooms at the Gewerbe- und Technikzentrum (GTZ) Raisdorf, which is a location where startup companies are located.

We did focus mostly on Ubuntu Linux and OpenOffice.org this year, because I thought that this will allow us to do more – and from the reaction of the people I think this was absolutely the right way to go. For every small team in the future I would also suggest to follow the ‘less is more’ principle. Less topics, less talks, higher quality and maybe even more time to talk to visitors.

They are all very happy if you answer their questions they PERSONALLY have in a private conversation. I tend to think more and more that the great talks are not that important and its unlikely that this will make your visitors satisfied.

It’s also because you need to know what troubles people have. If you talk you can not listen at the same time. I do regret a bit, that I didnt keep my original wish to use 2 hours between each talk including breaks. I think talks should normally not be longer than 45 minutes essentially with additional time to ask questions. But I am very much against to try to lock visitors in a strict 45 minutes corset or with too much fixed breaks. You definitely need to be flexible.

We also had two spontaneous talks after the official end of the talks by a younger visitor about Blender and some programming topic.

Although we had a 9 hour program people still looked hungry as they left. But not from no food – we had a lunchtime with real food, nothing vegetarian was available, thought.

As I woke up this morning I thought: Why do I do this, as its all volunteer work – but in the end I was happy to have organized it. I hope it also went well for you all over the world!?

Images from Event: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tpfennig/tags/sfd09/

SFD Flyer under CC-BY-3.0

We have released our SFD flyer under a Creative Commons license here. Because we think free software and free documents should be one. You can download it as JPEG, PDF and XCF.

Unfortunately not all layers are editable, because the first version was done in Photoshop and not GIMP and by importing the PSD file some effects could not be imported. I hope we will be able to do with Scribus on the next occasions.

Its gonna be good

In 4 days we will have our SFD in Kiel, Germany. many things didnt go too well, unfortunately, but I am positive about the outcome, anyway.

I think in the future we will have our standard topics:

• OpenOffice.org
• Ubuntu
• Free Software

So three talks – and everything else will be “nice to have”. So thates the idea for 2010 – 2009 will be similar. 2008 we also had a talk about OpenStreetmap and encryption,  but I think when you have only few talks you need to concentrate on the most important applications. If they change, one can change, but if not I would like to stick to the standard talks and rather change the content rather than the topic. This has some benefits. One of it is, that you can more or less print the flyers and posters without knowing much more than the date and the location. You can then add additional talks to the homepage.

I do not like it, if people retreat their talks weeks before an event, especially if the reasons they give sound shallow to me.  Anyway, we can cope with that.

I think SFD should be upfront and user orientated and less theoretical. Therefore I also think the distance between the talkers and the listeners should be shrunk. People should learn what Free Software is and how and why they can and should use it. People need to “get their hands dirty”.

Stuff should be on the way

Today I got the mail, that the material for the SFD teams, including ours should be on the way. Nice!

New website sfdsh.de

Hi, the SFD in Kiel and Schleswig-Holstein has a new page of its own: sfdsh.de.

Spam reduced in Wiki

We had some more spam in the softwarefreedomday.org wiki. I have begun to block the IP address rooms of those who continue to spam the wiki and have been successfull to exclude all that air traffic spam that plagued us the recent weeks. We will not have any problem with wiki spam once we will upgrade the MoinMoin wiki to a version > 1.8.0 after he SFD in September. We chose not to do it, because this would also include a syntax change, which would  not be so nice for those who have tought themselves how to deal with the current markup. But for 2010 we will make the switch – and btw. the new Moin syntax is more similar to MediaWiki/Wikipedia because it is based uppon ideas from Wikicreole.

The top 3 countries in Europe and those who still dont do a thing?

If I counted correctly these are the top countries in Europe (by number of events):

1. Russia (31)
2. Great Britain (8)
3. Poland (7)

Congrats so far!

These european countries dont have one event, yet:

• Portugal
• Norway
• Finland
• Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania
• Belarus
• Romania
• Turkey
• Czech Republic
• France (!)

So come on, give yourself a kick and start planning today! You dont need to do something huge! (Register)

Current status of SFD in Germany

Currently I see four teams on the map in Germany:

1. Kiel (LUG Kiel)
2. Offenburg (FreieSoftwareOG)
3. Cologne (FSFE Cologne)
4. Berlin-Marzahn (OSFanG)

Come on guys & girls, get up, stand up!

Call for Paper für den Software Freedom Day in Kiel

Der diesjährige Software Freedom Day Kiel wird am 19. September im GTZ Raisdorf stattfinden. Die Veranstalter suchen dazu noch Sponsoren,

Veranstaltungsort des SFD 2009 in Kiel

Aussteller & Vortragende. Ein Motto wurde noch nicht festgelegt, aber es wird aller Voraussicht nach einen Fokus auf den praktischen Aspekten Freier Software wie OpenOffice.org und Ubuntu geben, weil das viele Anwender besonders interessiert. Es wird darum gebeten Vorschläge und Angebote bis spätestens 10.08.2009 einzureichen.

Der Software Freedom Day (SFD) ist eine jährliche, weltweite Veranstaltung, bei dem die Erfolge von freier und Open-Source-Software gefeiert werden und über deren Vorzüge informiert wird. Die lokalen Veranstaltungen unterscheiden sich sehr in Umfang und Charakter.

Veranstalter in Kiel/Raisdorf sind die LUG-Kiel und die Firmen PfennigSolutions & Datendienst Kiel.

Ort & Art des SFD 2009 in Kiel gesucht?

Wo wollen wir es machen? Wo können wir es machen? Und wie? Es wird Zeit erste Planungen anzustellen.

Ich hatte überlegt einen Preis auszuloben für sowas wie Bestes Open Source Projekt oder so. Inklusive Engagement für Übersetzungen u.a.. Kann man sowas wuppen?