Software Freedom Day 2008 in Davao, a success!

September 20, 2008. Mini-Auditorium, University of Mindanao, Davao City, Philippines. Software Freedom Day 2008 in Davao city was a great success. There were approximately 500 attendees which comprise of students (majority), faculties, IT professionals, etc and we were just expecting about 200 attendees only since that was the seating capacity of UM's mini-auditorium. Thanks to University of Mindanao, CDITE XI, and PSITE XI for inviting their students to come along.

During that day, we did setup the place first with the undying help of a student organization in University of Mindanao called SINTACSS (Society of Information Technology and Computer Science Students). Kudos & thanks to SINTACSS for providing logictics during the event.



Before the Event

SFD 2008 in Davao City was an afternoon event that started at 1:30 pm and ended around 5:30 pm. Before the event, the DabaweGNU, Inc. volunteers oriented SINTACSS for the logistics and also guided them how to install Ubuntu Linux (which we received from Canonical), partitioning and some related Linux operating system stuffs.



Software Freedom Day 2008, the event



Around 1:30 pm, groups of people started to get inside the mini-auditorium. The auditorium was completely filled up. Even staircases were occupied too. It was an amazing feeling that a lot of people were interested to know what was Software Freedom Day and Free Software all about. When all was fine, the program started. Mr. Holden Hao, the emcee, started the program. He first thank University of Mindanao, CDITE XI, PSITE XI, and all of the schools and groups who participated on the event.







The presentation

Mr. Hao jump started an introduction to Software Freedom Day and Free Software relaying the importance why we were all gathered on that very special day. After which, the speakers prepared their presentations. First speaker was Mark Maglana -> who talked about Morph AppCloud & Ruby on Rails and how amazing it was for software and web development. I heard a lot of "ooohhh" & "aaahhh" from the crowd that time. The second speaker was an interesting one. A fourth year high school student of Philippine Women's College (PWC) by the name of Kevin Paquet ->, who talked and introduced WordPress, free and open source blogging software. The third one was yours truly. I did an introduction on GIMP and a demo afterwards. Fourthly, was Nathaniel Jayme ->who introduced XUL, ffehr, and FOSS. "Build it, Share it, Live it!", that was a great quote from him stressing the importance of Free and Open Source Software. And last but not the least, Marlo Simon Noval a.k.a. Ragingmon -> who mesmerized the crowd when he talked about Camera Tracking in Blender. He was able to end his presentation with an open movie created with Blender called Big Buck Bunny.

It was really a magnanimous event and I could say that it was the biggest Software Freedom Day 2008 ever held in Davao City and Mindanao at large.

Now, I will have to extend my thanks to the following:

Of course, Software Freedom Day committee, who spearheaded this World Wide event and sent us SFD 2008 collaterals & freebies. DabaweGNU, Inc. for the organizing the SFD - Davao. University of Mindanao for hosting the event. CDITE XI and PSITE as one of the local sponsors. The SINTACSS, an IT student organization of UM for providing logistics. IBM Philippines for the IBM Symphony giveaways. Ubuntu for the Ubuntu Linux CDs. To all the speakers, thank you. And most especially, to all of the attendees who participated on the event. Thank you so very much.

Thats gonna do it folks. Software Freedom! Awareness!

If in case I failed to thank someone, feel free to post a comment and I'll update my post. And by the way, video coverage to follow...

UPDATE: As promised. Be the first to watch the video coverage of Davao's celebration on Software Freedom Day 2008. View it at http://ragingfx.com. Thanks to Ragingmon for another great video coverage.

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