Location: Skopje, Macedonia

Local parent organization: Free Software Macedonia & 02 @ ShareKnowledge

Contact information: email: info AT slobodensoftver.org.mk

Plans for SFD 2007

The plan is below, for the report click on Skopje SFD2007 Report.

A team of 14 people worked hard all summer and the DVDs we plan to give away on SFD are in print. If everything goes OK we'll have them in time for the event. We will have around 5000 DVDs (with a customized Fedora + OpenCD) as a result from a cooperation with a local company. All teams in Macedonia will receive some amount of DVDs.

In Skopje we will have to places where people can come and get a copy of Free Software. The bookstores Magor and Tocka will host this as they serve as a local culture places as well. Experienced GNU/Linux user and Free Software will be present at these locations from 11 a.m. to 18 p.m. on Saturday so that people coming for a DVD can get some useful advice on the software or get some question answered. We will also set up some computers so the people can try the system and see what kind of software are they getting on the DVD.

The evening is reserved for a screening of "Good Copy, Bad Copy" (a documentary about the current state of copyright and culture). The movie isn't actually about Free Software. However we decided to show it, because we feel that the questions about copyright and (Free) culture are strongly related to Free Software. The screening will be at the Macedonian National Gallery "Multimedia Center - Mala Stanica". It will begin at 20 p.m.

We will announce the event on a press conference on the 13th of September. Update: We had a nice press conference. We hoped that a little more reporters will show up, but the five or six of them were OK as well. Some photos from the conference as well as the news that already go printed are availiable at http://www.flickr.com/photos/skopjesfd2007/ (we'll upload all the photos there).

Major websites and blogs in Macedonian published news about the SFD event today (10th Sept.) and Internet coverage should be good.

Plans for SFD 2005

Something simmilar to SFD 2004. We are also planing to make teams that will go to few schools and give lectures along with CDs and materials. More to come soon.

We're also organizing a 48 hours translation marathon on the 10th and 11th for localazing OpenOffice.org 2.0 into Macedonian. Translation marathon and other activities will take place in the city park and on a location near it. While one gorup of volonteurs is working at the localization site others will give out CD's and do small presentations on laptops owned by members of our organization.

Expect a report and a gallery of pictures from the first day.

Addon: SFD posters number one and number two

Report from SFD 2004

It's the 3rd of September today and I want to write a late review of what we did in Skopje to celebrate Software Freedom Day.

It seems that we lacked the will power and the enthusiasm we had when we started planning the SFD, couple of months ago. Encouraged with the sucess of FreeSoftwareFlood, which we organized earlier this year, and was very similar to what was planned globaly for SFD we wanted to make the actual SFD a bit bigger. We planned to organize a rock concert with garage-bands from Skopje and then distribute CD's and reading material about open source to the young people that would come. Sadly, the last couple of weeks before SFD our plans didn't work out.

We then decided only to give away CD's with small pamflets to random people in the city Park, since it was Saturday and the Park is full. We printed out about 70 T-shirts and burned 400 CD's with TheOpenCD(SFD version + couple of translated programs and texts in macedonian about open source).

Mainly people were interesed about the philosophy of sharing stuff.They stoped and listened. But, most of them said that they use computers in school because that have to, only check e-mail in Internet cafes or don't use computers at all. Most of them were "computer illiterate" and it's my opinion they only a few will try out the programs.

Maybe next year it will be better to celebrate SFD in organizing some kind of seminar to a narower target group, we'll see :).

Anyway here are some of the pictures from the SFD in Skopje.