Gathered together on Saturday night was an impressive collection of coding and non-coding women, if I do say so myself! Mairin Duffy (Red Hat and Fedora), Leslie Hawthorn (Google), Adelaida McIntire (FSF Intern), Deborah Nicholson (FSF membership coordinator), Hillary Rettig (author of the Lifelong Activist), Christine Spang (MIT, Debian), Hanna Wallach (Debian Women, GNOME WSOP ), and Marina Zhurakhinskaya (GNOME WSOP) all arrived at the FSF office in time for a casual dinner. Then we settled down to business and Stormy Peters (GNOME CEO, via phone) called in to participate remotely.

Just a month ago we announced our intent to hold a summit to talk about the very important issue of of increasing women's participation in free software. Women account for less than 2% of our community and that's just no way to run a successful movement to empower users.

The mini-summit was also a kick-off for us here at the FSF to start building a campaign program that brings more women into the community. As of right now, the next event is planned to be in Boston about six months from now, co-located with this year's Libre Planet conference hosted by the FSF. We also hope that our work will help start a much larger conversation within the community and leave us all with the personal challenge to recruit our women friends, family members and colleagues into the movement.

The minutes and ideas we came up with are all documented here. Please take a look!

I'm sure you've been wondering: How can I get involved? First sign yourself up for the email discussion list, and the Free Software Supporter and then you may want to stop by to share ideas in #glofs on freenode.net

If you're ready, take a few minutes to talk to other people in your free software project about increasing women's participation in your endeavors -- you may find that you have colleagues who have been waiting for someone to start this conversation.

Thanks to everyone who participated and everyone who sent along encouragement, ideas, links and materials!

by Deborah Nicholson
Membership Coordinator

It was a nice, crisp fall day outside, but we had a great group of people gathered inside at Encuentro 5 in Chinatown for Boston's Software Freedom Day. There were talks on hacking your blog, women in free software, free software on mobile devices, and how free software economics works.

Here we see the FSF's licensing guru, Brett Smith, exercising his extremely speedy typing skills (QWERTY or Dvorak? You never know with Brett...) at the registration table.

Felicia was our first brand-new member of the day -- welcome aboard! (If Felicia's example inspires you, then you can sign yourself up online here.)

We caught Leslie Hawthorn engrossed, reading something -- later on she was part of the evening's mini-summit on Women in Free Software, held in the FSF offices just a few blocks away.

Walter Bender took us all on a whirlwind tour of the multi-layered Turtle program for kids, which is part of the Sugar operating system, and announced the good news that the portable version, called "Sugar on a Stick," can now run on top of Trisquel, a fully free GNU/Linux distribution.

FSF senior sysadmin Ward Vandewege breaks out the air quotes while talking with FSF executive director Peter Brown, and erstwhile volunteer Matthew Craig.

Sysadmin intern Bernie Innocenti was clearly missed by this past summer's campaigns intern, Adelaida McIntire, who came back to Boston just for the day's festivities.

Encuentro 5's bank of computers was available for anyone who wanted to check out Trisquel.

FSF board member Mako Hill allows the crowd to contemplate the GNU for a moment while he gets ready to show us another anti-feature; aka an unwanted feature that some proprietary software vendors use to get extra money out of their customers -- while thwarting their freedom.

In between speeches, people are pondering software freedom and/or waiting until the pizza line is a bit shorter.

RMS came by in the afternoon to cover what's on the horizon for user freedom. Here he stands with Bernie and Harley.

This was a great day in Boston! We'll have more media up from our event, including some audio and video, in the next few weeks. I hope your Software Freedom Day was as inspiring as ours.

See you next year!

P.S. Thanks so much to FSF directory maintainer Kelly Hopkins for taking pictures!

Congratulations to Osama Khalid (OsamaK) for being selected as the first ever GNU Generation member of the month! Osama speaks Arabic natively, and has been using this gift to help the free software community. He worked with projects including KDE and VLC this past month to translate popular applications into Arabic. As a FSF/GNU translator, he also recently translated Holmes Wilson's blog post on Ogg Theora.

Translation is especially important, because it makes the work of the free software community accessible to so many new people. With Osama's work, the world's Arabic-speaking population will gain the ability to use a computer in freedom.

Osama's contributions extend beyond translation, though. Osama feels very strongly about the free software values. He applies these values to everyday life by educating others in his local community about free software. If all free software users fully understood and promoted these values, the state of free software would be more powerful and influential than it is today.

In addition, Osama has stayed on both the GNU Generation and the Free Software Foundation IRC channels to help those that need it. He even volunteered to use his knowledge of the MediaWiki API and Python to write a script for GNU Generation.

Thank you to everyone who participated in GNU Generation last month. It was very difficult for the committee to pick the winner, as there were so many great contributions. Keep up the great work!

If you are aged approx. 13-18 and are interested in participating in GNU Generation, take a look at the announcement and the homepage.

I had a wonderful time working at the Free Software Foundation this summer, but it is time for me to return to Hampshire College as my internship comes to a close. It was great working closely with the FSF staff and I have learned a great deal. I spent the majority of my time working on LibrePlanet and defectivebydesign.org.. My internship was overall productive but unfortunately there is one project that I really wanted to get up and running that was not realized. Even though my internship is ending, this will not be the end of my involvement in the free software community and I am hoping to get it started in the near future.

The project is the creation of a web page that explains free software to people who have never heard of it, or are just learning about it. There should be a place on fsf.org or gnu.org, where someone who is new to free software can be shown key concepts in a non-technical, direct, fun way. It is extremely important for us to reach out to more people, and I think this website is a great way to start.

The website should be very user-friendly and have very short explanations of the most important concepts that one needs to know in order to understand free software. I'm hoping that you, the free software community, will help me with the creation of this "Introducing Free Software" website. I've made a wiki page on LibrePlanet that I hope you will use by contributuing ideas you have for the site. Perhaps you could share the most successful ways you have been able to explain free software to people. Please e-mail me at campaigns@fsf.org if you would like to volunteer some of your time to make this website a reality. I can't wait to work with the community on the creation of this site and I hope I will see some of you at Software Freedom Day in Boston on September 19th.

Here's some great video by Dana Moser of the launch of the Windows 7 Sins campaign in the Boston Common, hosted in Ogg Theora format using the video tag of course! (Direct download, smaller download)

The event featured a giant trashcan in the Boston Common with (symbolic) boxes of proprietary software that people could throw into it.

More video from the event coming soon, so stay tuned.