Celebrate Software Freedom Day with the LibrePlanet community

Saturday, September 18th is Software Freedom Day, a worldwide celebration of user freedom. It's a great opportunity not only to introduce new people to free software, but to connect with other free software activists in your area or online.

But what about the day after? How can we sustain these links? How can we make sure that people in your area who hear about free software can find a local community to connect with?

This year the FSF will be directing people who visit fsf.org and gnu.org to connect with local activists via the community wiki LibrePlanet.

It's a place where free software activists have been coming together to meet each other -- listing existing local groups and forming new ones, collaborating on activist projects, and working on materials to introduce new people to free software.

So in addition to handing out CDs of free GNU/Linux distributions tomorrow with your local Software Freedom Day team, please join us in bringing some of this celebration and advocacy to the LibrePlanet wiki, to build a resource and meeting place that will last throughout the year.

You can find lots of interesting projects on the wiki to contribute to. Just log in to the wiki with your existing FSF account, or create one at http://www.fsf.org/joiner. Then, get started!

• Search for a LibrePlanet group in your area. If there's not one, get one started! Creating a permanent group is a great way to stay connected with the people you might meet tomorrow. Help us improve the directions for forming such local free software activist groups at http://libreplanet.org/wiki/LibrePlanet_Teams. You can see an example of a current group at http://libreplanet.org/wiki/Group:LibrePlanet_Massachusetts.

• Use the handy badges we've created at http://libreplanet.org/wiki/Category:Userbox to tell other people which free software programs, distributions, and activist issues you are most interested in -- putting the badges on your user page enables other people with the same interests to connect with you. Please create some new ones of your own as well! You can see an example of how they are used at http://libreplanet.org/wiki/User:Mattl.

• If you don't see one already, create a page describing your favorite piece of free software, with some tips, or for the free software issue you are most interested in.

• Feel lucky? Explore through http://libreplanet.org/wiki/Special:Random.

Thanks for all the work you do in support of software freedom, and good luck with your events tomorrow!