[wplug-board] Are we doing anything for Software Freedom Day? (Possibly just a theoretical question....)

Justin Smith justin at adminix.net
Tue Aug 5 11:28:43 EDT 2014


It's certainly an idea worth considering. Wouldn't it be hilarious to do 
something like this right next to an Apple store?

The Free Software Foundation's various sub-projects, such as Defective By 
Design, have handouts that can be freely used. Would they be too 
aggressive for our purposes? Maybe. The resources are there, though. 

Since I imagine we'd be pointing people toward Ubuntu, Linux Mint, or a 
similar beginner-friendly distribution, we could also pull content from 
http://www.spreadubuntu.org[1]. 

Still, it's one thing to have a bold message in a public place and quite 
another to give them a reason to hear you out. As I mentioned in passing 
to the board on a previous occasion, Pittsburgh Filmmakers has a lot of 
older Macs - ones that could still run Linux - that need to be disposed of. 
Instead of paying to have them recycled, what if we could partner with 
them to have them donate to interested passers-by?

Admittedly, that's a very idealistic suggestion, but having a banner that 
says "FREE COMPUTERS" would probably get people's attention. We'd get 
good PR, and PF would save a chunk of change on recycling costs.

-- 
*Justin Smith*
GNU/Linux System Administrator

/"Isn't it ironic that the proprietary software developers call us 
communists? We are the ones who have provided for a free market, where 
they allow only monopoly."/
/-Richard Stallman/


Software Freedom Day is September 20th.  We didn't do anything the last 
two years (we intended to - but it just didn't work out....), and we have a 
very short runway if we're going to do something this year.  So I don't know 
if we can (or if we should even try).

But, theoretically, if we were to do something, I would think the following 
considerations should be ... considered.  ;-)



     1. I would assume that any SFD activity would be an "outreach" kind of 
event.  I don't think it makes any sense to plan an SFD activity intending it 
to be attended by folks currently in our sphere, or who currently have any 
awareness of the open source community.  Preaching to the converted, 
and all that. 
     2. In view of that, I would think we'd want to hold any kind of SFD event 
in a very public place that has lots of foot traffic.  I don't think we'd be able 
to productively "promote" such an event, because the intended audience 
isn't even aware this is something they might want to be interested in (I'm 
not saying that it's not possible to promote an event like that to such an 
audience - I'm just saying I think successfully doing that is beyond our skill 
set).  So people would have to find it "by accident", so it should be in a 
place where a large number of people are there for other reasons anyway.  
I still think the idea of trying to talk to the management of one of the local 
shopping malls, and seeing if we could convince them to let us use a 
vacant mall kiosk for an afternoon, would be good - though I admittedly 
have no contacts in the "management of local shopping malls" 
community... 
     3. Even though we did nothing last year, we actually did register a 
"project team" for an SFD event, and we were hoping to receive the SFD 
"goodie package" with banners, stickers, pamphlets, other giveaway 
items.  But we received nothing (I know other teams did, but we did not).  
I'm not convinced we'd receive anything this year either.  That may affect 
whether we think it would be useful to even try to do anything. 
     4. Related to the above - team registration, and pretty much everything 
else, related to SFD 2014, seems to be running way late this year (i.e., 
later than in previous years), so I am not confident that they'll even mail 
out the "goodie packages" in time for September 20th anyway. 
Basically, I don't know that we can really do anything on this - but I thought 
(especially since we intended to do something the last couple of years) 
that there should at least be an opportunity to discuss it, if anyone else 
disagrees with this.


--Pat.





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[1] http://www.spreadubuntu.org
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