SFD Start Guide

This start guide is designed to introduce you to SFD and give you some tips and pointers for organizing your own SFD team event. If you have any questions please join and use the teams mailing list or email <info AT softwarefreedomday DOT org>. You can also chat to us on #sfd on irc.freenode.net (link) if you want to bounce ideas around or get more advice. If you are on orkut join the Software Freedom Day community to share your ideas.

Forming a Local SFD Team can be a fun, effective community building experience for your local user group and community. Software Freedom Day is an outreach day where you can inspire newcomers with the values and quality of Free Software and communicate the broader issues of Software Freedom through a variety of activities of your choice. Is there something locally relevant to your country or region that you need to express? Is there some great local success story you want to tell?

Software Freedom Day is your chance to stand united with the entire Free Software world with what you care about. Freedom.

How can I celebrate Software Freedom Day?

There are two primary ways to celebrate SFD:

1. Join a local SFD Team and help make their SFD event a success.
2. Make your own SFD team!

SFD will be most effective if we keep some target groups in mind:

• Families
• Government
• Small Business
• Big Business
• Schools and Colleges

Steps to build your team

1. Read the CodeOfConduct page and see if you can agree!

2. Sign up for the SFD-announce mailing list. This is a low bandwidth announce mailing list only. Team discussions happen on the sfd-discuss list which you are also encouraged to join.

3. Create a team page on this wiki below your Continent/Country to prepare - you will need to sign up or log in to be able to edit pages. Please make sure you read the instructions for creating a new team page.

4. Register your team. If you register before the deadline (see the Registration page) then your team will receive some goodies to help you make your event awesome!

5. Check out the competitions page for ways your team can win great prizes! Make sure you also keep up to date with the mailing list for announcements and to share information with other teams.

6. Report on your event! You can create your own team gallery, and we'll have an easy report webform for you to fill in after the event.

The average SFD event usually requires only one or a few organisers to share the workload and ensure the event is in hand. You can often recruit helpers from:

• GNU/Linux User Groups
• Special Interest Groups (Programming Languages, Distributions, Applications, etc. )

• Universities & schools

• Computer clubs
• Families and friends
• Companies (Developers, Marketing departments, etc.)

We have found that the event can bring the local groups together as well as grow the community as a whole. The number of helpers required depends on the sort of activity you choose, but generally, the more the better. That way people have a good time and it also becomes a social event. If your volunteers enjoy themselves, they will pass on a good vibe and offer to volunteer next year too

Remember, we are all volunteers so it is a matter of what we can, when we can Always remember to thank your volunteers and make sure they have a good time.

What should we do?

Be creative! You can organise any kind of SFD event you want. Your organising team can find a location / time to have a few meetings to brainstorm / discuss about the event:

• Set your goals like objectives, target audiences, scale, style, theme
• Event timing (should it be a morning, afternoon, evening or a whole day event? why?)
• Who can be the Master of Ceremony, host or speakers?
• What should be included as contents
• Others

But just to get you started, here are a few ideas some people have had:

• Have a FOSS picnic or BBQ
• Run a booth at a market, fair or computer day
• Get together with schools, universities and other people who can benefit from Free Software
• Run a competition, best FOSS developed music, graphics, short video
• Set up simple public booth and hand out CDs.
• Run some demo machines in a public space and show off your FOSS
• Hold installation workshops and combined FOSS installfests in schools, businesses or other areas
• Hold a seminar on IP, Free Culture, Patents, etc
• Have a cultural event - food, drink, music (jam session? - "open-source music").
• Organise an expo to highlight local FOSS success stories

Budgeting

Depending on the sort of activity and scale of your event, you may need to set a budget for the event. It's good to prepare a budget plan and find ways to finance it, there are usually a few ways:

• Sponsorship from Free Software Friendly Companies
• Donation from members of local communities and computer clubs
• Sharing cost among the participants

If you plan to raise fund, it's good to prepare a proposal clearly specify the event details as below:

• Objective of the event
• Target audiences
• Messages to be delivered
• Date and venue
• Activity scale and form
• Budget plan
• Benefits of sponsorship / donation

Promoting the event in advance

It is very important to communicate the event to your target audiences, there are a lot of ways just to name a few here:

• Posters and flyers: Download the poster design from here (tbc), put your event details, print them out and post them in selected places two weeks before the event
• Announcement in different websites and mailing list: e.g. Linus User Groups, Computer Clubs, Interested groups, Colleges and Universities
• Press release: if you have connection with local press of your country / city, approach them, either send them a press release to build awareness of your event before and after the event or host an interview if possible. Otherwise, you can always approach local technology / IT related journalists to do so. You may want to contact them to make them come to the event.
• Social Networking
• Word of mouth: ask around to bring friends, families and co-workers to the event

Preparing for the day

Below is a basic checklist that should cover most events that you would plan on running:

• Got your volunteers organised?
• Do you need insurance for your event? (some people can look to larger organisations to help out with this. Ask around)
• Do you have schwag to hand out? CDs, flyers, balloons? Anything shiny that will give you the chance to engage in discussion. We are proud to be able to offer to teams free materials to help you look and be great on the day!

  • SFI encourages you to distribute any Free/Libre Open Source Software. Please keep in mind that what you distribute should be pleasantly usable by your target audience.

• Have you liased with any other SFD teams in your region or country? Sometimes this can help with pooling resources and having a stronger all round effort
• Do you have have decent signs prepared so people can find/recognise your event?
• Do you have signs to tell participants how to tag, twitter, etc.?
• Do you have a board to allow participants to write down what they feel about the event?
• Is your event in an easy to find place that is useful to reach out to a broad new audience?

During the event

According to experiences, there are a few things you may want to pay attention during the events.

• Documenting the whole event by pictures or video and share them in different channels, it is suggested to tag the pictures to "softwarefreedomday"
• Interviewing audiences to get feedback of the event (as sometimes paper surveys may not get the same result)
• Others would be the temperature, ventilation, sound level of the speakers, noise control from audiences

After the event: feedbacking and reporting

• You may want to gather those materials that can be reused for the next event.
• Of course you have to indulge yourselves with a good meal to talk about the feeling of the event together with the other volunteers, saying thank you to all the volunteers are very important as well.
• Encourage the volunteers / yourself to take pictures during the event and ask organizers, audiences what do they think, post them in websites and / or blog about it so that we can reach out even more people
• Send a press release to different press
• Send thank you letter and report summary to sponsors, speakers and supporting organizations

• Check out the competitions page for ways your team can win great prizes! Make sure you also keep up to date with the mailing list for announcements and to share information with other teams.

• Report on your event! You can create your own team gallery, and we'll have an easy report webform for you to fill in after the event.

• Summarize the event experience, share them with our mailing list here http://mail.sf-day.org/lists/listinfo/sfd-discuss so that we can put them into this StartGuide to make it more complete

Useful Documents / Templates and Examples

• Sponsorship proposal template
• Presentation
• Press release
• Event report

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