Skopje SFD 2007 Report
All photos are on Flickr. I don't know how to insert Flickr photos properly, so I'll just put links in the text.
Text in Macedonian available at SpodeliZnaenje sfd2007 label.
Pre-event activities
We had big plans for this year's event. 5000 DVDs with Free Software for the whole country, half of that for Skopje... 3 great places to promote software freedom and a good press coverage. However, some things didn't go as planed.
Press conference
We had a press conference at noon on 13th September. Novica (me :-) ) and Damjan at "NGO Infocentar".
The press conference was at "NGO Infocentar", a local non-profit that provides this kind of services to NGOs. There were about six reporters from local media. The stories showed up in the press the following day and on SFD.
Photo from the newspaper "Vecer". The headline reads "Share Free Software". "Share" - „Сподели“ is a initiative of Free Software Macedonia for promotion of Free Software and Free Culture. It is one of our major activities throughout the year. Workshops and screenings are held every week under this name.
Photo from the newspaper "Dnevnik". The headline reads "Saturday - Software Freedom Day".
Photo from the newspaper "Spic". The headline reads "Macedonia celebrates Software Freedom day".
Also a local television made a short interview for its "Urban news" show. Youtube link.
All these are in Macedonian. 
Posters, flyers...
Newspaper are a good thing, flyers are even better. Biljana (our resdident designer) made nice flyers that we distributed around the city: bars, cafes, schools.
She also made a cool poster. The main text is "Share Freedom".
SFD 2007
By Friday afternoon everything looked set for a great event. The 5000 DVDs with Fedora and TheOpenCD arrived just in time. Around 2500 DVDs were for the event in Skopje. The rest to be divided between teams from Prilep and Bitola.
Unfortunately, the SFD material was late (still is actually ). We didn't have any balloons or shirts. Update: The balloons package arrived today, 20 September. Still waiting for the shirts.
The DVD disappointment
Zoran and Damjan took some DVDs at home to check if everything is OK. And everything was not OK. The print shop probably made some mistake and we had 5000 DVDs with Fedora that won't boot. We found out about this on Friday night, so there wasn't much we could do. The next morning we checked the rest of the boxes to see if all of the DVDs are bad - and they were. Around 14 people worked on the DVD whole summer. TheOpenCD was working. However, we gave out only around 100 of those just until we waited for the Ubuntu CDs to be burned. We didn't want to give a DVD that only partly works. We had Fedora posters, but no Fedora to give away. 
After a short run of disappointment we went to a CD shop and bought 500 CDs. Later, at Tocka we started burning Ubuntu and a live Fedora CD. Because of this we were being late at Magor. Damjan, Jovan and myself went there, leaving Bozidar, Vladimir, Ivan, Toni, Marko, Zoran, Georgi and Stojance at Tocka (Tocka is a much bigger place than Magor).
Conversations at Magor
Magor is a small book cafe. We set up a laptop with GNU/Linux in one corner and invited people to sit at our table. We had one Ubuntu CD for every guest plus a short presentation about Free Software. We had a good round of conversations because we could answer specific questions for every visitor and show things that he or she wanted to see. Around 50 people visited Magor from 11h to 18h.
After 18h we went to set up the place for the screening of the movie.
Burn & Install Fest at Tocka
Tocka is a much bigger place. There we had more computers and people. CDs we burned there and also an ad-hoc install fest was organized as visitor came and asked for someone experienced to install GNU/Linux on their laptops.
The burning crew - Marko, Stojance and Ivan. They burned about 100 CDs with Ubuntu and Fedora Live. Some amount of those ended up in Mala stanica later that evening.
The chief installer Bozidar installing Fedora for Ana on the right.
Tocka, being a regular free software/culture space (we have our regular screenings there), had more visitors - around 80. The event there went on for another hour or so after 18h.
"Good Copy, Bad Copy" at Mala stanica
Mala stanica is a national gallery. There is an art-cafe named Medium inside that helped us to organize the screening of the movie. With the usual 10-15 minutes delay we played the movie in front of a full room of people between (30 and 40 people). It was a nice show - most people watched and didn't talk.
Highlights
In our experience so far the major question for all user was: is there AutoCAD for GNU/Linux? Even people who aren't architects or other professionals who actually need this program asked this question. And on this SFD 10 or so architects came to ask for a CD with GNU/Linux. It was a big surprise for us.
It turns out that people learned that Free software is a better option for most of the stuff one can do on a PC. They couldn't switch completely to GNU/Linux because of vendor lock-in with AutoCAD, but all of them wanted to use Ubuntu for surfing the net, listening music, watching movies and all the other usual stuff people do on their computers.
The End :-)
We feel we did a good job on this year's Software Freedoma Day in Skopje considering the misfortune we had. We gave away only about 150 CDs. If we had the DVDs we would've hit the streets and do another flood - but we'll have to leave that for next year.
People here are much more informed about Free Software than they were couple of years ago and past SFD events have a lot to do with that. Hopefully we can do better job next year and have another great SFD in Skopje.
