[open-science] Fwd: [okfn-discuss] Document Freedom Day - March 27th 2013

Wed Feb 27 15:58:28 UTC 2013

This would be a wonderful thing for science and for a hackathon. Maybe we
could get publishers such as BMC and PLoS involved.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Erik Albers <eal at fsfe.org>
Date: Wed, Feb 27, 2013 at 1:46 PM
Subject: [okfn-discuss] Document Freedom Day - March 27th 2013
To: Open Knowledge Foundation discussion list <okfn-discuss at lists.okfn.org>

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Dear List of OKFN,

I am Erik and I work for the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) [1]. We
are a non-profit organisation that is dedicated to the furthering of Free
Software and working for freedom in the emerging digital society.

Some days ago I had the chance to meet Beatrice Martini [2] and we had some
exchange of ideas. She was very interested in our Document Freedom campaign
that comes with an international day to celebrate the use of Open Standards.
As it is a decentralised campaign that has its focus on local activities,
she told me to send a mail to this list to engage some of you to participate
- - hence, I'll give it a try : )

What is document freedom? Have you ever been stuck with some data that you
have not been able to open because it was in a format that needs some
specific kind of software to open it? Can you imagine that the same things
happen each day tens of thousands of times? Can you imagine how much
knowledge exchange doesn't happen just because sender and receiver
(intentionally or not) are using different data formats? Can you imagine how
much knowledge future generations will lose if we keep on using proprietary,
closed data formats that one day no one will ever be able to open because
the company behind it had business secrets and patents on it but then got
bankrupt?
Open Standards on the other hand are data formats that have an open
documentation and everyone is free to use or implement it in its own
software. The first characteristic (open documentation) guarantees that now
and even in a hundred of years everybody interested can understand the data
format and read it. The second characteristic (free to use) guarantees that
now and in even in a hundred years everybody is free to write some piece of
software to give everyone else the ability to read a specific piece of data.
That is why everyone and every public institution - education and
administration, e.g. - should use Open Standards.

This is exactly the point where our document freedom campaign comes in.
Every year on the last Wednesday of March, we run a global campaign that is
called "Document Freedom Day" [3]. The concept of the campaign and its aim
is to raise awareness of the usefulness of Open Standards. Therefore we
encourage all kind of local groups to organise an event that highlights the
importance of the use of Open Standards. Last year there have been more than
50 events in more than 20 countries [4]. This year, Document Freedom Day
(DFD) will be on the *27th of March 2013*.

The most important part of the whole campaign is done by guys like you and
me! In order to celebrate information accessibility and Open Standards, we
heavily depend on local activity on public places, in universities, in
hackerspaces or everywhere you can imagine. I am pretty sure that you have
very good ideas what you can do to raise some attention. You can also
combine your activity with promotion for the OKFN.

If you are interested now, please have a look at some ideas of what you can
do [5] and feel free to support your event with our promotion material [6]
that you can order for no cost. You can order the material on the webpage or
just reply to this email. Finally, if you are planning some activity, don't
forget to register your event on our events page [7].

Thank you very much for your attention.
Your participation in DFD can make the difference!

Thank you very much in advance,
   Erik

PS: If you have any questions - don't hesitate to ask me

[1] http://www.fsfe.org
[2] http://okfn.org/members/bmartini/
[3] http://www.documentfreedom.org
[4] for more information see last year's report:
http://www.documentfreedom.org/news/2012/news-20120403-01.en.html
[5] http://www.documentfreedom.org/getinvolved.en.html
[6] http://www.documentfreedom.org/promotion.en.html
[7] http://www.documentfreedom.org/events/events.en.html

- --
Erik Albers | https://fsfe.org/about/albers/albers.en.html
Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) - Campaigns & Community
Support us now: https://fsfe.org/support/?eal

                Free as in Freedom!
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-- 
Peter Murray-Rust
Reader in Molecular Informatics
Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
University of Cambridge
CB2 1EW, UK
+44-1223-763069
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