Yesterday, March 31st 2010, we organized a public booth, from 9:30 am til 5:00 pm, at the entrance of the IFI (Institut de la Francophonie  pour l’informatique) which is in the middle of the Polytechnic Institute of Hanoi’s campus.

Pictures from the event are available here. Great work!

Dradio at DFD: “Feel more honoured than for the Grimme Prize”

[Originally posted by FSFE's Germany Coordinator Matthias Kirschner here]

Today was a really good day. I am reading all the reports from Document Freedom Day. About the DFD cake in South Africa, the activity from in Slovenia with the Supreme court, and the cool “I can’t read your Documents” pictures from Romania. This is really amazing. While I am waiting for updates from the planned activities from the Rheinland and Offenburg in Germany, and the prize for Radio Orange in Vienna Austria here an quick update from Berlin:

First thing in the morning was to get rid of my e-mails and of course dress up with me “rOgg on” t-shirt. Than I was prepared for the day. At 11:00 Alex Kahl joined Hugo and me in the office. He was responsible for the t-shirts. After lunch we brought all the t-shirts and flags to Deutschlandradio Kultur. Stephan Uhlmann from FFII brought the DFD tart. I have to say it was tempting to eat the tart before going in Good luck for Deutschlandradio that Alex Finkenberger brought the DFD certificate he disigned, so Stephan and I had to sign it and where not able to eat the tart. Than more and more Fellows joined us: Christan, Dirk, Grischa, Jürgen, Lena, Olaf, and Torsten.

Than Stephan and I explained why we honour Deutschlandradio for their Ogg-Vorbis use, and why this is important to Free Software. Since 2006 they are providing their Live streams in Ogg vorbis. At the moment it is the only public radio station I know that provided Ogg vorbis streams. Here a picture after we gave the certificate to Dr. Günter Müchler, program director of Dradio.

DFD group picture by Bettina Straub

While Dietmar Timm, head of Dradio Wissen made sure, everybody got something from the tart Egbert Meyer, managing director for the online services of Deutschlandradio, said “We feel us more honoured through that prize than for a Grimme Prize. That was quite a statement

DFD tart by Bettina Straub

Torsten set up website with all the picture from himself and from Bettina Straub from Deutschlandradio in good quality.

DFD group picture with flags by Torsten Grote

My thanks go to all the people from Deutschlandradio for providing the Ogg-Vorbis streams! Especially Mr Timm and Mr Meyer for the organisation before the event. And you might already have noticed it, this activity for Open Standards would not have been able without all of our motivated Fellows who participated in the event. You all rOGGed!!!.

–
Matthias Kirschner
Join FSFE’s Fellowship and protect your freedom!

DFD is simply everwhere. From beautiful Offenburg in Germany, Fast Edi writes:

I hope you all had (or perhaps still have) a wonderful DFD today.

In Offenburg the Community “FreieSoftwareOG” informed customers and
interested people in front of a computer store we cooperate with.

We had some give-aways (Flyers, Ubuntu and openSuse CDs, Leaflets, …)
and talked to people, telling them how important it is to have free and
open formats for our electronic data.

For a picture visit http://blogs.fsfe.org/fast_edi
(notice that they are a certified Apple-Store… )

To save you the extra click, here’s the picture:

DFD in Offenburg, Germany

Send me attachments I can read, use open standards!

There are many ways to share documents, files and data over the Internet. Among them, emails are often used because people can communicate from one mail server [1] to another without any difficulty. Why does it work so simply? Because emails are designed to use a set of open standards [2], based on the Internet protocols.

However, sometimes people send attachments along with their emails, and it happens frequently that the attachments cannot be read by the recipients. For example, many attached files are documents produced by word processors and it can be impossible to read them correctly if you do not have the same word processor. Many proprietary word processors use proprietary file formats [3]. In 2002, a campaign was started to put an end to Word attachments. But the same is true for all kinds of documents and files: texts, spreadsheets, slides, videos, etc.

When you attach a file to an email, please make sure that your correspondent will be able to read your files correctly. It is a basic principle of courtesy. And there is an easy way to make this possible: use open standards. If you do so, your correspondent will have the possibility to choose which program he or she wants. Open standards guarantee sustainability and interoperability for your data, making sure you will be able to access them in the future, even with another software, on another platform or operating system.

Moreover, by promoting open standards you will help everyone: sharing documents can be as easy as sending and receiving emails! If you receive an email using proprietary file formats, don’t hesitate to share this page and explain why it is important to use Open Standards.

1. ^ Mail servers transfer emails from one computer to another. For more information, you can check Wikipedia
2. ^ Open Standards are protocols and file formats that can be freely used and implemented, and are designed in an open process. For more information, see the Open Standards definition.
3. ^ Microsoft Word by default saves your files in the “.doc” format or the “.docx” format. If you share these documents with people using different word processors, they may not work properly. Good alternatives for Microsoft Word are documents in .RTF or in .ODT (use the “Save As” feature)

You can help us improve this message on FSFE’s wiki. This work is licensed under the terms of creative commons BY-SA.

Matija Šuklje explains: “Since it is of paramount importance that all these archives should be accessible by anybody as well as be in tact and readable for many generations to come, the courts decided that open standards and open formats are the only way to reach that goal. Along with that they made great use of open formats (ODF consisting of zipped XML files) as well as free software (OpenOffice amongst others) to automate many tasks. The Supreme court expressed a great gratitude that their work has been noted by the FSFE Fellowship group Slovenia and agreed to participate in the DFD celebration in the evening as well.”

The DFD celebration will begin at 18:00 in Kiberpipa/Cyberpipe and will consist of a few short (cca. 30 minutes) lectures on the matter and an open table where anybody will be able to ask and discuss open documents and open standards. After that we will continue to party with some refreshments and snacks — there might be another cake there as well

The Dept of Arts and Culture in the unit called National Language
Services, uses the Deja vu Font so that they can translate into all South
African languages. Some SA languages require diacritics. We celebrated DFD
at the Department who are keen to take this further and would like to host
a large event next year. We also had members from the State Information
Technology Agency. The CIO said a few words about the importance of
preserving our heritage and how technology should assist this and not
hinder it.

Along with the cake we had given everyone the recipe for the cake and had a
short discussion on what would be needed for us to preserve the know how
and the recipe document itself so that we could enjoy it for the next 20
years on Document freedom day.

The vision of the Department of Arts and Culture is to develop and
preserve South African culture to ensure social cohesion and
nation-building.

Seaparo Phala, the Department's CIO, cutting the DFD cake

The rationale for the Department to use ODF is South Africa’s constitution, no less. Sez Aslam:

Another reason why the Dept of Arts and Culture are key in leading DFD
celebrations. See (b) but think that c and d are just as important

The primary legislative mandate of the Department (of Arts and Culture)
comes from the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, which states
that:

Section 16 (1) “Everyone has the right to freedom of expression, which
includes-

a) freedom of press and other media;
b) freedom to receive or impart information or ideas;
c) freedom of artistic creativity ;and
d) academic freedom and freedom of scientific research

Color me impressed.

Department staff seconds ahead of enjoying the DFD cake

In South Africa, people will share a cake at the Department of Art & Culture. In the Republic of Moldova, the Software Libre group will inform students and professors at the Technical University of Moldova about the importance of Open Document Formats. In Greece, the Association of Greek Users and Friends of Free Software will organize an event inside the University of Macedonia, what’s more they will send an Open Letter to public Institutions about Document Freedom Day.

We know that one of the advantage of Open Standars is that they guarantee sustainability to our documents and files. So this is not a surprise that the Japanese initiative MyOpenArchive is a promoter of DFD. MyOpenArchive advocates in favour of open access, and self-archiving for academic papers in Japan.

Finally, the Free Software team of OpenOffice.org, which uses the OpenDocument Format (ODF), are promoting the event. Alexandro Colorado, OpenOffice.org Spanish Community Manager is also giving an online conference to explain the benefits of Document Freedom.

Don’t miss tomorrow,  I’ll tell you more about what our fellows are doing in Slovenia!

The NGO Espirito Livre is organizing a conference on March 31st in Vitória/ES. The conference will include different talks, and goes on from 19:00 at the FAESA Auditorium. More details in portuguese at http://dfd.espiritolivre.org. The organizers are asking people to donate one kilo of non-perishable food as entrance fee. The food will be donated after the event.

For those not close by, 4Linux is preparing a web conference that can be accessed from all over the world. The speakers’ list include John “maddog” hall, president of Linux International, Jomar Silva, ODF Alliance representative in Brazil, and Clarisse Coppetti, Vice-President of Technology at Caixa Econômica Federal, one of the largest government banks in Brazil. The event happens on March 31st, at 19:00 Brazilian Standard Time at http://webclass.4linux.com.br/dimdim/webenv/dfd-view.html. More details on the conference at http://www.4linux.com.br/noticias/2010/boteconet_4linux_document_freedom_day.

Yet the politics of Open Standards are far from boring. Right ahead of Document Freedom Day, not one but two hot issues are flaring up in the European Union.

The first is the European Interoperability Framework (EIF). This used to be a recommendation by the European Commission to use Open Standards and Free Software in the public sector. The Commission is currently revising the text. FSFE has seen the latest version, and it looks bad. Instead of showing European countries how to make their public sector IT systems work together thanks to Open Standards, as the original EIF did, the current version basically says “do whatever you feel like”. If the EU member states adopt this version, there will be no further push for Open Standards and open document formats in their public sector.

The second issue that is hot in Europe right now is the Digital Agenda. Neelie Kroes, newly installed as head of the Directorate General (somewhat like a ministry) for the Information Society (INFSO), is proposing an ambitious policy framework. The version we have seen talks about the importance of Open Standards and public sector procurement:

Procurement practices and rules for ICT products and services must be adapted to ensure that public authorities – including EU institutions – can make the best use of the full range of open standards. Interoperability across all policy fields, notably eHealth, eGovernment, Green ICT, and cloud computing-related initiatives must also systematically be promoted.

There is also an explicit link to the EIF revision:

An update of the European Interoperability Framework will be an important step in this regard.

As far as we know, this sort of thing doesn’t sit well with everyone in the European Commission. DG INFSO appears to be under huge pressure from other DGs to remove the reference to Open Standards from the text, and make it less ambitious overall.

FSFE is active on both issues, talking to policy makers and calling public attention to the problem. What’s at stake here is the fate of Open Standards in Europe’s public sector in the coming years.

This makes Document Freedom Day even more important. This is a day where we can show why Open Standards and open document formats in the public sector matter to us all.

This is just what people in Romania have done last week. Their public administrations are using proprietary file formats, making life difficult for Free Software users. So these activists went and told their public administration: “I can’t read your documents!”

It looks like they had a great day out! More images here.

Home Remedy Colon Cleanse

As promised here an update on our DFD activties for Germany and Austria.

This week the German and the Austrian team >published a press release about our DFD activity (at the moment only in German)). The news that we and FFII will give out this years DFD prize to Deutschlandradio (Germany) and Radio Orange 94.0 for their use of Ogg-Vorbis already got good media coverage on Gulli, Golem, Heise, Netzpolitik, OSZine, and Pro-Linux.

I am now very much looking forward to Wednesday to meet the people from Deutschlandradio in Berlin. They said, they are also looking forward to get our famous DFD tart.

.

To spread the knowledge about Open Standards and Ogg-Vorbis in particular, we would like to ask you to make Ogg-Vorbis your topic for April. What does that mean? Here some ideas for this month:

• Write a letter to a radio station and ask them for an Ogg vorbis stream
• Help our sisterorganisation, the FSF to update the radio stations on the Ogg friendly sites page.
• When you are shopping, ask the shop assistants to only show you all the media players who are able to play Ogg vorbis (and/or flac) (I already did that several times )
• Send Ogg-Vorbis audio files to your friends and help them to install Free Software to play it (e.g. Video Lan Client).
• Try to always say “Ogg-Vorbis player” instead of “mp3 player” in that month. I am sure people will ask you what that is. So you can explain.

Beside that I would also be very interested if you find out which radio stations have introduced Ogg-Vorbis streams at what date. If you have other ideas what you can do, share them in your blogs, microblog about them with the hashtags #roggon / #playogg, or share your ideas on our public dicsussion lists. So help us to rOgg On in April.

–
Matthias Kirschner
Join FSFE’s Fellowship and protect your freedom!