Offtopic: ITC Celebrations in general and Freedom celebrations in particular for 2019
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Hello, everyone. I am Ignacio Agulló, and since the year 2011 I
maintain the ITC Holidays Calendar for the professionals of the
Information and Communication Technologies in general and for the
members of the Computer Engineers Association of Spain (Asociación de
Técnicos de Informática, ATI) in particular. The calendar contains all
of the editions for a total of 16 yearly celebrations, some of which are
already extinct.
The Calendar is published through the Google Calendar application
in formats iCal and HTML. This allows for subscribing to the Calendar
from most agenda and e-mail applications, and also view the calendar as
a web page or insert it in one. The calendar is available in English,
Spanish and Galician. Here you have the link to the English version:
International ICT Holidays
iCal:
https://calendar.google.com/calendar/ical/atinet.es_475jrhngqo61ovcspnaj07onjk%40group.calendar.google.com/public/basic.ics
HTML:
https://calendar.google.com/calendar/embed?src=atinet.es_475jrhngqo61ovcspnaj07onjk%40group.calendar.google.com&ctz=Europe/Madrid
At the present moment, six holidays are still unannounced for 2019
– subscribing to the calendar is the best choice to avoid being
surprised by unexpected date changes.
To maintain this calendar takes few work, but lots of patience.
When every January the 1st I get my hands on it, most of the
celebrations are still unannounced... starting on the first one!
Because of this reason every year the diffusion of the calendar gets
delayed, as I refuse to issue a calendar where the very first
celebration isn't announced yet. That's where the patience comes in: I
am forced to watch every day for the remaining celebrations until they
get announced at last. As to the first celebration, Data Protection
Day, the people of the Council of Europe overdo themselves every year
where it comes to laziness, and on this 2019 they announce the
celebration with less than 24 hours in advance. They should follow the
example of Ted Kekatos, who consistently announces the SysAdmin Day 52
weeks in advance.
Concerning the Freedom celebrations, I will update you about them:
the news aren't bad, but awful. Over these years I have followed six
Freedom celebrations, two non-ITC (Free Education Day and Free Culture
Day) and four ITC (I Love Free Software Day, Document Freedom Day,
Hardware Freedom Day and Software Freedom Day). Well, in the world wide
web you can only find the announcement for one of these celebrations:
February, 14: I love Free Software Day 2018,
https://fsfe.org/campaigns/ilovefs/index.en.html
Organizer: Free Software Foundation Europe, https://fsfe.org/
The announcement for this celebration is published recently, and
that is the reason for this message to be published today in the
GNU/Linux Trisquel forum. But, what about the rest? The rest of the
ITC Freedom celebrations are in Limbo - and not for not being announced
yet for 2019, but because their sites in the world wide web are down
since at least January the 1st. Save for a brief interlude of some days
where the websites are up, and where it is possible to check up that the
only celebration announced for 2019 is Document Freedom Day, the rest of
the time they are down. What do these three down sites have in common?
They are run by the Digital Freedom Foundation, same as the two non-ITC
days (Free Education Day and Free Culture Day). Their website,
http://www.digitalfreedomfoundation.org/ , is down too. This situation
also happens in 2016.
To sum it all up, Freedom Celebrations need to be better cared for.
--
Ignacio Agulló · name at domain
On my message from February the 8th, I said the following:
On 08/02/19 19:42, Ignacio Agulló wrote:
> Concerning the Freedom celebrations, I will update you about them:
> the news aren't bad, but awful. Over these years I have followed six
> Freedom celebrations, two non-ITC (Free Education Day and Free Culture
> Day) and four ITC (I Love Free Software Day, Document Freedom Day,
> Hardware Freedom Day and Software Freedom Day). Well, in the world wide
> web you can only find the announcement for one of these celebrations:
>
> February, 14: I love Free Software Day 2018,
> https://fsfe.org/campaigns/ilovefs/index.en.html
> Organizer: Free Software Foundation Europe, https://fsfe.org/
>
> The announcement for this celebration is published recently, and
> that is the reason for this message to be published today in the
> GNU/Linux Trisquel forum. But, what about the rest? The rest of the
> ITC Freedom celebrations are in Limbo - and not for not being announced
> yet for 2019, but because their sites in the world wide web are down
> since at least January the 1st. Save for a brief interlude of some days
> where the websites are up, and where it is possible to check up that the
> only celebration announced for 2019 is Document Freedom Day, the rest of
> the time they are down. What do these three down sites have in common?
> They are run by the Digital Freedom Foundation, same as the two non-ITC
> days (Free Education Day and Free Culture Day). Their website,
> http://www.digitalfreedomfoundation.org/ , is down too. This situation
> also happens in 2016.
>
> To sum it all up, Freedom Celebrations need to be better cared for.
News are still awful. The Digital Freedom Foundation is still in
Limbo. After long downtimes, their sites are back online... in a pig's eye:
-Hardware Freedom Days site isn't available and its domain redirects to
the Software Freedom Days website.
-Software Freedom Days website invites you to register your event for
the 2017 edition.
-Document Freedom Days website is a backup copy with last years date...
and if you try to verify it by checking the map of events, it is even
worse, it shows events scheduled for 2016.
So in spite of Software Freedom Days website proudly proclaiming
at the end of its page that the Document Freedom Day is happening on
2019, march the 27th, when you visited the Document Freedom Days
website, there was nothing at all. Nuts. Proof:
https://web.archive.org/web/20180328180751/http://www.documentfreedom.org/
So I took the only possible decision. I went to the Calendars of
TIC Celebrations that I maintain, and deleted the 2019 edition for this
event. Officialy, the Document Freedom Day for 2019 hasn't been
celebrated. Or at least that is what the Calendar of TIC Celebrations
says, that not only announces the incoming TIC events happening, but
registers all of the editions of the main TIC events celebrated since 1969.
In the previous days, seeing that the date was closing in with no
life signals, I was thinking on sending a warning message to de Digital
Freedom Foundation, but surprised... they don't have an e-mail address.
Their contact page just offers a form. Sorry, but that isn't serious.
When I send an e-mail message, I get to keep a copy. When I introduce a
message in a form, I don't get to keep a copy. You do not offer an
e-mail address? Then you don't deserve to be contacted.
"To sum it all up, Freedom Celebrations need to be better cared for."
--
Ignacio Agulló · name at domain
...and another one bites the dust. The Digital Freedom Foundation
has been organizing since 2013 the yearly celebration called the
Hardware Freedom Day... until now. Same as with the Document Freedom
Day, its site in the world wide web has been down since at least the
beginning of the year. Again, I have had to go the the Calendar of ITC
Celebrations that I maintain and delete the celebration, at least for 2019.
--
Ignacio Agulló · name at domain
This does indeed sound like a sad situation with the Freedom Day celebrations. I can think of two likely causes; they have run short of funds, or they have run short of volunteers (or both). I know very little about the Digital Freedom Foundation etc and how they were organized. Were they funded entirely by donations, or were there public grants, philanthropic grants, or corporate sponsors? Were they operated as formal NGOs with a staff, or were they entirely volunteer-driven efforts?
Does anyone know anyone who was involved that may be able to give us some insight into what's happened?
EDIT: for the record, since it's not really related to using Trisquel, this kind of of post really belongs in the General Free Software Talk part of the forum:
https://trisquel.info/en/forum/general-free-software-talk
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