News/20080326
From Document Freedom Day
26 March 2008: The world's first Document Freedom Day
Today is Document Freedom Day: Roughly 200 teams from more than 60 countries worldwide are organising local activities to raise awareness for Document Freedom and Open Standards. To support the initiatives surrounding the first day to celebrate document liberation, DFD starter packs containing a DFD flag, t-shirts and leaflets have been sent to the first 100 registered teams over the past weeks.
In a world where records are increasingly kept in electronic form, Open Standards are crucial for valuable information to outlive the application in which it was initially generated. The question of Document Freedom has severe repercussions for freedom of choice, competition, markets and the sovereignty of countries and their governments.
"We are very happy about the response and activities that teams around the world have scheduled," says Ivan Jelic, DFD Coordinator. "Activities we have heard about range from local speeches and information events through to prizes being given to governmental bodies that adopted good policies in the field of Document Freedom and Open Standards. It will be a challenge to document everything that is taking place today."
The DFD team will do its best to gather all the media reports, pictures and stories around this first DFD and collect them on the DFD web page for reference and future editions of the event. If you have material about local document liberation activities, please send mail to: coordination@documentfreedom.org
How you can get active
The Document Freedom Day is a collaborative effort.
You can make a difference by linking to http://documentfreedom.org, generate your own artworks or use the ones available at http://documentfreedom.org/Artwork
You could also print out some of the DFD leaflets at http://www.documentfreedom.org/2008/DFD_Starter_Pack#Leaflet and give them to your co-workers, family or friends. And if you feel creative, consider taking pictures or small video testimonials that show the world what Document Freedom means to you!
About the Document Freedom Day
The Document Freedom Day (DFD) is a global day for Document Liberation with roughly 200 active teams worldwide. It is a day of grassroots effort around the world to promote and build awareness for the relevance of Free Document Formats in particular and Open Standards in general.
Document Freedom Day is supported by a large group of organisations and individuals, including, but not limited to Ars Aperta, COSS, Esoma, Free Software Foundations Europe and Latin America, IBM, Google, NLnet, ODF Alliance, OpenForum Europe, OSL, iMatix, Red Hat, Sun Microsystems, Inc., The Open Learning Centre, Opentia, Estandares Abiertos.
The list of DFD supporting groups can be found
http://documentfreedom.org/Who
The list of DFD Teams is available at
