26 March 2008: The world’s first Document Freedom Day

Today is Document Freedom Day: Roughly 200 teams from more than 60
countries worldwide are organising local activities to raise awareness
for Document Freedom and Open Standards. To support the initiatives
surrounding the first day to celebrate document liberation, DFD
starter packs containing a DFD flag, t-shirts and leaflets have been
sent to the first 100 registered teams over the past weeks.

In a world where records are increasingly kept in electronic form,
Open Standards are crucial for valuable information to outlive the
application in which it was initially generated. The question of
Document Freedom has severe repercussions for freedom of choice,
competition, markets and the sovereignty of countries and their
governments.

“We are very happy about the response and activities that teams around
the world have scheduled,” says Ivan Jelic, DFD Coordinator. “Activities
we have heard about range from local speeches and information events
through to prizes being given to governmental bodies that adopted good
policies in the field of Document Freedom and Open Standards. It will
be a challenge to document everything that is taking place today.”

The DFD team will do its best to gather all the media reports,
pictures and stories around this first DFD and collect them on the DFD
web page for reference and future editions of the event. If you have
material about local document liberation activities, please send mail to:

coordination@documentfreedom.org

How you can get active

The Document Freedom Day is a collaborative effort.

You can make a difference by linking to http://documentfreedom.org,
generate your own artworks or use the ones available at

http://documentfreedom.org/Artwork or generate your own.

You could also print out some of the DFD leaflets at

http://www.documentfreedom.org/2008/DFD_Starter_Pack#Leaflet

and give them to your co-workers, family or friends. And if you feel
creative, consider taking pictures or small video testimonials that
show the world what Document Freedom means to you!

About the Document Freedom Day

The Document Freedom Day (DFD) is a global day for Document
Liberation with roughly 200 active teams worldwide. It is a day of
grassroots effort around the world to promote and build awareness for
the relevance of Free Document Formats in particular and Open
Standards in general.

Document Freedom Day is supported by a large group of organisations
and individuals, including, but not limited to Ars Aperta, COSS,
Esoma, Free Software Foundations Europe and Latin America, IBM,
NLnet, ODF Alliance, OpenForum Europe, OSL, iMatix, Red Hat, Sun
Microsystems, Inc., The Open Learning Centre, Opentia, Estandares
Abiertos.

The list of DFD supporting groups can be found
http://documentfreedom.org/Who

The list of DFD Teams is available at
http://documentfreedom.org/Category:Teams

(Local contact for France: Ars Aperta / contact at arsaperta dot com)