SFD Competition 2011
Digital Freedom International is one more time very proud to announce the winners of the 2011 SFD Best Event Competition! For its sixth edition the competition is seeing a very high number of remarkable entries and choosing three winners out of all the submissions was not an easy task. This year we have extended the voting committee to members of the marketing team. The DFI board would like to particularly thank Marcos Marado and Buddhike Kurera from Portugal and Sri Lanka respectively, for the seriousness with which they have undertaken this new responsibility.
Another interesting fact of 2011 is the amount of celebrations we had in the Philippines (29 for a population of 92 millions) and the quality of those events. Indeed we have seen more and more participations year after year in this region of the world and it seems each team is learning from their past making each year better than the previous one. Africa has also impressed us quite a bit, with much more professionaly organized events accross the continent in whole. Again we have seen the same teams coming back to celebrate SFD but also a few newcomers who didn't do bad at all neither.
As usual we have hand picked a special gift for the three winning teams and this year they will be receiving a Lemote Yeelonng netbook architectured around the Loongson CPU (which will enable them to improve application support on this platform and run only Free Software) as well as the book "Free Software Free Society: selected essays by Richard M. Stallman" signed by the author himself (if the winning teams didn't distribute any non-free Linux distribution).
So without further ado let us introduce this SFD 2011 Best Event competition winners in no particular order.
8layertech
2009 competition winner, 8layertech has again surpassed itself this year with an amazing reach both through the event participation itself but also with great media coverage including but not limited to a 25 minutes TV interview on a tech program (Future Perfect on ANC), some inspirational short videos, a "SFD song" guitar competition ("Battles of the bands") and great overall running of the event. Don't take our word for it, just go and click on the link here to see how well they did.
CP-Union
Likewise CP-Union team did a marvellous job with TV coverage, attendance and event organization itself. Reaching a thousand participants and hosting 30 speakers including a congressman advocating Free Software, they were able to cover discussions from processing, Indie video games, OpenStreetMaps, Scrum Dev and Agile Methodology using FOSS (34 topics in total). Another highlight of their report is also their coverage of the preparation work to run such an event, definitely worth a read for anyone interested in doing their own SFD: read the full report here
SFD Tunisia
Following the success of Sfax SFD’2010 organized by the IEEE ENIS Student Branch and the success of the first TunAndroid anniversary organized by TunAndroid community in June 2011, both teams cooperated and co-organized SFD Tunisia 2011 reaching over 350 people and attracting participation from the Tunisian secretary of state for technology as well as leaders in the Free Software field such as Google, Ubuntu Tunisia, Mozilla Tunisia, SecuriNets, just to name a few. Great sponsors, great speakers, well above average participation, nice report and obviously great organizers: an excellent job done!
Read the full report here
Highly Commended Entries
The entries below were all highly commended for many different reasons. Some were highly locally relevant to their communities, some were quite innovative, all were worth while granting the status of Highly Commended and publishing for the broader community to enjoy, learn from and celebrate! Congratulations to you all and again many thanks for your efforts!
