I need a mea culpa here !! :( I actually did not cover my supposed shift at the table - so I can't really be included in the "Thank you"! But I can report that on the SFD visitor survey, there were some positive mention of the group by the visitors. (I am processing the survey now) Also could you let me know how many signatures you collected, so I can cross reference with survey response numbers? CHeers Daniel
Hi Folks, Just wanted to say a big thanks on behalf of all of us to those who helped out with Software Freedom Day on the 18th.
I'd particularly like to thank Michael, Dave, Geoff, Alex and Daniel for attending to the Melb Free Software Interest Group table. They spoke to many people during the day, collect lots of registrations for this list and a heap of signatures against software patents.
Big thanks to Dave for organising CDs of the brand new Trisquel 4.0. It was fantastic to be able to hand out copies of a fully-free distribution. It was exciting to see a sharpened focus on free software and freedom this year. I suspect this was helped by the excellent timing of Stallman's speeches earlier that week.
On the other side of the library, the talks went very well. Attendance to my "Why is Free Software Important?" talk was bulked up by a strong attendance of my family members, who managed not to fall asleep. ;)
Unfortunately we weren't able to hear from Pia Waugh due to a delay in Senator Lundy's flight, but we did manage to fill some time showing the large crowd videos on free software, DRM and having a discussion about software patents. Senator Lundy walked in the door to applause and gave an excellent speech about how the government is planning to work better with it's citizens, making several references to "free software". The other talks by Rami Olwan (Creative Commons), Andrew Cunningham (Multilingual Web) and Paul Took (Red Hat) were very interesting too.
I haven't heard how the short talks went, but I have no doubt that they were great.
There are some great photos by Chris: http://www.flickr.com/photos/chrissamuel/sets/72157624855903041/
And by Jiri http://luv.asn.au/sfd2010/hires.html
Regards, Ben