Location: Tijuana, Baja California, México
Local parent organization: LinuxBaja.org
About SFD 2006
This year SFD coincided with the Mexican Independence Day celebrations. Even though it was a long weekend because of the holiday, we had a sizable audience. Our event lasted six hours in total, and many of the attendees stayed through all of the event. The event was held at the Tijuana Cultural Center's (CECUT) Reading Room. CECUT is a complex where main cultural events take place in our city, it has a museum, theatre, planetarium, and different exhibits running all year round.
Activities
In our 2006 SFD celebration we had 5 conferences, each of them with a time for questions from the public. In the time between conferences we gave away Creative Commons licensed music, Linux course certificates, and the event T-shirts and book separators hand-crafted by a member of our community.
This year we dropped the installfest -which last year took a lot of resources but yielded meager results- and focused instead on answering as many doubts as we could. For that we had two activities: "Wikiman", where knowledgeable members of our community with distinctive clothing mingled around answering any questions, and an open forum at the end themed "Living with Free Software" where we tried (and succeeded) to create a participative environment. Our main focus was to underline the community-oriented and voluntary effort that is enbodied in Free Software.
We also had an LTSP for demos, and an Impress slideshow permanently running with information on the event, highlights on the 2005 celebration on other parts of the world, and some Free Software facts. We also distributed copies of The Open CD that LinuxBaja's members donated and burned, along with the distros provided by Software Freedom International.
Conclusion
Although last year's event attendance was larger, many of last year attendees were CECUT's passer-by. In 2005 had several city-wide promotion activities that included three radio shows (including one that is heard by about a million persons in both Tijuana and San Diego in the US), a TV appearence, and a newspaper article. This year we only had one radio show that is also transmited as a TV news show, along with posters and flyers in universities and colleges in our city. Still, regardless of the comparatively reduced promotion activities, we had about the same number of registered attendees, which on average stayed for a longer part of the event, and even though all of it in some cases.
We hope to have made an impact on the attendees, and have contributed at least a bit on the task of promoting Free Software.
Team Contact: Vladimir Hernández, interco@linuxbaja.org
Event website: http://floss.linuxbaja.org/
Contact information: floss@linuxbaja.org