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From: "Georg C. F. Greve" <greve@fsfeurope.org> Date: 08 February 2008 12:03:23 PM To: greve@fsfeurope.org Subject: Invitation to join the Document Freedom Day 2008

Dear colleagues,

advocating Free Software towards various people and groups is often made more difficult by their legacy of data lock-in. Migration to some seems a choice of gaining their freedom by losing all their old data, and in too many cases that is unfortunately true enough.

The logical answer to this are Open Standards that give everyone the freedom to use, study and implement them. But most people don't know much about this issue and generally don't take care to save their data in ways that allow them to choose and live in freedom.

There has been some debate about this through the years, with particular focus around the Open Document Format (ODF) due to current events.

In this group, people have been discussing the idea of a "Document Freedom Day" for some time - and FSFE's Serbian team now jumped at the possibility and took initiative for the Document Freedom Day, which will advocate freedom of data in the area that everyone has a direct relationship to -- documents -- to raise awareness about the principles.

The Document Freedom Day is planned as a complimentary activity to the Software Freedom Day - so the two are placed six months apart: The first Document Freedom Day will be held 26 March 2008.

The message of the DFD will be focussed on benefits of freedom in data and formats, specifically the Open Document Format (ODF) and the relevance of Open Standards.

You can find the (still rudimentary) web site at

http://www.documentfreedom.org

and you are very much invited to join this effort as an organisation and get personally involved.

If you know others who might have an interest in this activity, please feel free to also invite them. But please avoid blogging about this before the first official announcement, as we would prefer to add some more information first.

With best regards, Georg

-- Georg C. F. Greve <greve@fsfeurope.org

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