SFD 2006 Competition

Software Freedom Day is proud to announce a fantastic competition to get those creative juices going. With Software Freedom Day only 6 weeks away, on September 16th, we have some excellent prizes to help inspire you to create the best Software Freedom Day ever!

There are five prizes of signed Software Freedom Day T-shirts for individuals and five IBM servers to be awarded for team contributions.

The competition will be judged by the LUG Radio team and the Software Freedom Initiative board. The deadline for submitting entries to comp@sf-day.org is 30 September 2006 - read the rules below for full details.

IBM Sponsorship

We welcome IBM as the sponsor of the major competition prizes, the POWER5 servers. It's great to have IBM on board supporting Software Freedom Day 2006.

"IBM is proud to be a sponsor of Software Freedom Day and its efforts to raise awareness of Open Technologies to developers and users around the world," says IBM Linux Community Program Manager Robert MacFarlan.

IBM has long been an advocate, sponsor and contributor to the Linux developer community and Open Technology development. Continuing this tradition of support, IBM has also contributed a number of POWER5 and IBM PPC970 servers to Universities world-wide for the purpose of Linux and Open Source project development by the community. These servers are hosted by the universities and freely available with a simple registration for use. They include a number of POWER5 Servers and also an Apple Power Mac G5 for those interested in doing Altivec or other PPC970 optimizations. These are shared environments, so users have to abide by each site's acceptable use policies.

These systems provide a great chance to become familiar with the technology that you have a chance of winning in this competition:

Oregon State University Open Source Labs - SLES on POWER5 and Gentoo on Apple Power Mac G5
Sourceforge.net compile farm - SLES on POWER5
University of Augsburg - Debian on POWER5
Australian National University - SLES on POWER5
Linux on Power @ Peking University - SLES on POWER5
UNICAMP (Universidade de Campinas) - Red Hat, Debian, and Slackware partitions on POWER5

General Rules

The closing date for all entries is 30 September at 12h00 UTC (Coordinated Universal Time). The time of receipt of entries will be that indicated by the SFD mailing list archives.
Winners will be notified by email within 4 weeks of the closing date and will be announced publicly on the SFD website and elsewhere.
The organisers have the right to make public any information submitted as a competition entry.
Entries can only be submitted via email to comp@sf-day.org with the words "competition entry" included in the email subject line.
Only one entry for one contest may be submitted per email, and the contest must be clearly identified, for example: "Individual:Best global version of the official SFD logo", or "Team:Best SFD documentary". (This rule was added September 14.)
Entries for the individual competitions must indicate the name of entrant. Entries for team competitions must indicate which team is being represented.
The judging panel consists of the LUGradio presenters and the board of Software Freedom International.
The judges' decision is final and no correspondence will be entered into.
Contestants who are rude or abusive or who are found to have submitted fraudulent information about themselves or their entry will be excluded from the competition.
The promoter of this competition is Software Freedom International, 718 Fox Hollow Drive, Hudson, New Hampshire, 03051, USA.
Further details of each competition are described below.

Individual

The prize for each of the individual categories is a Software Freedom Day 2006 T-shirt signed by Alan Cox, Aaron Seigo, Jeff Waugh, Lawrence Lessig, Mark Shuttleworth, Andrew Tridgell, Rusty Russell, and Jon maddog Hall.

Best event photo

No more than 2 entries per person, submitted as email attachments.
Photos must be taken on Software Freedom Day (16 September 2006) or at an SFD event.
Photos will be judged on artistic merit, correspondence with the goals of Software Freedom Day and general newsworthiness.

Best localised version of the official SFD logo

No more than 2 entries per person, submitted as email attachments.
A localised versions of the SFD logo is an adaptation using local symbols, colour palettes or mascots.
In the spirit of SFD all digital entries must be produced using a FOSS graphics package and presented to the panel in an open format, sources should be made available on request.
Source images used must be correctly licensed and should not just be scraped from Google Image Search.
The entrant must agree to license the entry under a suitable Creative Commons license.

Best global version of the official SFD logo

No more than 2 entries per person, submitted as email attachments.
A global version of the logo is one submitted to the SFD organisers or to the website prior to Software Freedom Day (16 September 2006).
The logo should be transferable to other regions, although some degree of language localisation is acceptable.
In the spirit of SFD all digital entries must be produced using a FOSS graphics package and presented to the panel in an open format, sources should be made available on request.
Images used must be correctly licensed and should not be scraped from Google Image Search.
The entrant must agree to license the entry under a suitable CC license.

Best SFD blog coverage

Entries should take the form of an email containing the URIs of blog entries related to SFD, including preparations, references to press coverage and the proceedings of the actual day and subsequent effects.
The blog entries should all be written by the contestant.
Entries will be judged by quantity and quality of blog coverage as well as relevance of the coverage to a wider community.

Highest ranking Government official at SFD event (photo required)

No more than two entries from a single entrant.
Entrants may submit photos on behalf of a third party, in which case the prize, if any, will be awarded to that third party.
Photos should include evidence that the photo was taken at an SFD event or on Software Freedom Day (16 September 2006).
Government official submissions determined to be at equal levels (e.g., two country presidents) will be put into a hat and a winner will be drawn.
The prize goes to the community individual who organised the official, not the official personally or to the person submitting the photo.

Team

The prize for each of the team categories is a high performance IBM server similar to the POWER5 server.

Best SFD event publicity

No more than one entry per team.
Entries will take the form of emails containing a description of the different forms of publicity (TV, print media, online, etc) including hyperlinks to such information where possible.
An indication of the reach of each publicity channel (e.g. local TV channel versus national TV channel) should be given.

Best SFD documentary

Entries will take the form of multimedia presentations, including but not limited to movie files (AVI, MPG, OGM).
Entries should be published in non-proprietary formats
The closing date may be extended upon request in this category - please email comp@sf-day.org if you would like more time to submit your teams' entry.

Best plan for FOSS deployment project on new server for community benefit

Prizes will be awarded to the two top entries in this category.
Entries will consist of written descriptions of the project and relevant supporting materials (such as photos, web links and scanned newspaper articles).
Any project which is deemed to increase access to IT of a community or improve the use of IT in a community organisation, using open source software, will be considered. This includes (but is not limited to) innovative internet cafes, school or classroom projects, NGO or community service IT projects and hosted internet services.

Best SFD event

Entries will consist of descriptions of the event, photos, web links, scanned newspaper reports and possibly other multimedia content.
Entries will be judged on the scope and success of activities, innovativeness of the events, number of people reached, amount of publicity and other criteria.