FreedomBox

Eben Moglen video at Internet Evolution While at Personal Democracy Forum last week, Eben was interviewed by Nicole Ferraro of Internet Evolution. The first part of that video, focusing on defining what the FreedomBox is, has now been put online here: Internet Evolution. Further videos still to come next week.

Introducing the Technical Advisory Committee As the community continues to push the FreedomBox from idea towards reality, it is time to expand our technical leadership team. We are happy to announce the formation of a technical advisory committee ... [More] to help coordinate and guide the development efforts of this project. This advisory committee is already underway, with an initial membership of industry leaders including: Bdale Garbee, Open Source & Linux Chief Technologist at Hewlett-Packard, Jacob Appelbaum from the Tor project, Sam Hartman, former Chief Technologist at the MIT Kerberos Consortium and IETF Security Area Director, Sascha Meinrath, Director of the New America Foundation's Open Technology Initiative, Rob Savoye, long-time GNU hacker, Gnash lead developer, and winner of the 2010 award for the Advancement of Free Software Matt Zimmerman, former Canonical CTO We'll be hearing more from the TAC over the coming weeks and months. Anyone interested in following the activity of the advisory committee as it happens is welcome to check out the public archives of their email list at http://lists.freedomboxfoundation.org/s/arc/tac (the list is for TAC members, so please do not attempt to subscribe). If you want to talk to the TAC in real time, they can be found in #freedombox-tac on irc.oftc.net. [Less]

How We're Going To Do This I want to thank all the generous and dedicated contributors who made our Kickstarter "0 to 60 in 30 days" campaign a resounding success. More than 1,000 contributors took us from 0 to almost 90 in those 30 days, and we are ... [More] grateful to each of your for your support. We will do our best to justify your confidence. Your donations will allow us to begin to coordinate contributions by volunteers from every corner of the Free World. Together, we will work to make our shared vision a reality. Ours is a large undertaking with many moving parts. We at the FreedomBox Foundation are here to help communicate, facilitate, and spread the FreedomBox project around the world. We plan to administer the effort based on four organizational pillars: Functional software development and integration; User experience design, implementation and integration; Communications and fund-raising; and Industry relations Each of these pillars will be led by an advisory committee, with all activities coordinated by a small full-time staff at the FreedomBox Foundation. Advisory Committee membership will evolve, as developers and others who commit themselves heavily to the project step up. Initial nominations reflecting early commitments by leaders in our community will be announced shortly. Bdale and I have begun contacting initial members of the Technical Advisory Committee that Bdale will chair. Once assembled, that Committee's first activity will be to lead the public development of an initial road-map. More announcements concerning process and schedule will appear here soon. In addition to our financial contributors, I want to thank also the wiki editors and mailing list writers who have contributed so many good ideas and so much positive energy to launch us on this adventure together. Eben Moglen [Less]

After Kickstarter We've completed our Community Angel round of Kickstarter funding, and I want to thank everybody who donated, spread the word, evangelized and joined the discussion. It is amazing to see a worldwide community coalesce around ... [More] supporting Freedom and developing this technology. Current Activity and Plans We are still searching for a community relations facilitator. We have a number of resumes and are starting to do some interviews. It's a slow process, and more great people apply every day. We continue to seek further funding to fill out the rest of our budget. We've started to brainstorm a roadmap at http://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/UserRequirements/BrainStorm. I took the results of that page and am boiling it down to essential project goals. That will be published for a round of community hacking, which will help us define exactly what this project intends to do within the broad mandate of FreedomBox possibilities. Bdale Garbee is slowly enfolding the large amount of technical work ahead of us into his grasp. As the technical advisory committee gets up to steam and a roadmap coheres, we will start to make real progress. I attended Libre Planet and spent a weekend waving the FreedomBox flag and inviting people to join our growing effort. It was a wonderful weekend. I encourage anybody attending conferences to do lightning talks about the project. There's a lot to talk about and the response will be terrific. Our translation team is now over 50-strong and making short work of our existing media page. It has been a great deal of effort undertaken with grace and good humor. Thanks to all who have helped! If you want to join the fun, sign up to the translation list and introduce yourself. We plan to form further teams around non-technical aspects of this project. These teams will manage documentation, user support, public outreach, conferences and the like. T-Shirt Designs One of the things we offered Kickstarter donors was a T-shirt. We are thus soliciting T-shirt designs. The theme of the shirt is Community Angels. It would be good to involve our logo, which was designed by Luka Marčetić. The chosen design will be printed on t-shirts that we will give to donors. Of course, if your design is chosen, we will cover you in thanks and make sure you get a shirt too. I will also buy you a beer next time we meet. Send designs in a free file format to [email protected] before April 15. Vector graphics preferred. Get Involved! Thanks again to everybody involved and interested in this project! Your support is what makes this work. If you want a more interactive discussion than this announcement, sign up to our development list. or join us in #freedombox on oftc.net. Best regards, James [Less]

Libre Planet Followup I attended Libre Planet in Boston this weekend with a goal of talking about the FreedomBox to anybody who would listen. I gave a lightning talk to let people know it exists and was deluged with interest afterwards in the ... [More] hallway. As expected, the FSF crowd has a lot of great ideas, not just about how to implement the FreedomBox, but about how to organize a project of this scope. Scores of people expressed interest in further volunteering. I hope to see them in IRC and the email discussion soon. Rob Savoy, in particular, is a fascinating individual who could teach us all a thing or two about development. I made some headway in arranging for teleconference facilities for the FreedomBox Foundation. IRC is great, but we're going to need some group voice calls at various points. I've added to my todo list an item to make sure we can record calls so we have logs where appropriate. I talked specifically to some old free software experts, the hard core hackers who have track records of pulling off ambitious projects. I believe I convinced some that this project is a place to put their energy and that we'll see them active soon. I invited a woman to the project who has a long history of improving the communities she's in. She is over committed for the next several months, but I've scheduled a note to follow up with her. I talked to several people who worked on OLPC or OpenMoko, other large projects with some commonalities with the FreedomBox. I received some interesting and frank views about what went right and what went wrong in those efforts. Some opinions are most worth passing on: First, OLPC did not test its interface with end users early enough. I talked to multiple people who thought this should have been done sooner. FreedomBox should put the target end user into the design process early. Second, OLPC had some incredibly ambitious requirements that spilled over from one part of the project to another. The requirement that the interface be usable by non-literate users drove a lot of the innovative design, but it made some tasks quite hard. Third, OpenMoko folks spent a lot of time making a distribution-- packaging and recompiling all those Debian packages for their platform. It used a lot of resources and the repos were never complete. FreedomBox should not be a Debian-based distribution so much as a a Debian-based project that relies on a lot of already-existing packages. Meshing is hard. Nobody I met knows anybody who is nailing mesh networks. I'm going to get all the mesh heads together soon for a real conversation to see if we can work towards a recommendation on the most promising avenue. Michael Stone pointed me to Heilmeyer's Catechism. Those are some good questions. Big thanks to Matt Lee at FSF for throwing a great conference. And to Deb Nicholson for hosting me and towing me around town. She has great ideas about how to include more people in FreedomBox. [Less]

Open Source Veteran Bdale Garbee Joins FreedomBox Foundation Board NEW YORK, March 10, 2011-- The FreedomBox Foundation, based here, today announced that Bdale Garbee has agreed to join the Foundation's board of directors and chair its technical ... [More] advisory committee. In that role, he will coordinate development of the FreedomBox and its software. Garbee is a longtime leader and developer in the free software community. He serves as Chief Technologist for Open Source and Linux at Hewlett Packard, is chairman of the Debian Technical Committee, and is President of Software in the Public Interest, the non-profit organization that provides fiscal sponsorship for the Debian GNU/Linux distribution and other projects. In 2002, he served as Debian Project Leader. "Bdale has excelled as a developer and leader in the free software community. He is exactly the right person to guide the technical architecture of the FreedomBox," said Eben Moglen, director of the FreedomBox Foundation. "I'm excited to work on this project with such an enthusiastic community," said Garbee. "In the long-term, this may prove to be most important thing I'm doing right now." The Foundation's formation was announced in Brussels on February 4, and it is actively seeking funds; it recently raised more than $80,000 in less than fifteen days on Kickstarter. About the FreedomBox Foundation The FreedomBox project is a free software effort that will distribute computers that allow users to seize control of their privacy, anonymity and security in the face of government censorship, commercial tracking, and intrusive internet service providers. Eben Moglen is Professor of Law at Columbia University Law School and the Founding Director of the FreedomBox Foundation, a new non-profit incorporated in Delaware. It is in the process of applying for 501(c)(3) status. Its mission is to support the creation and worldwide distribution of FreedomBoxes. For further information, contact Ian Sullivan at [email protected] or see http://freedomboxfoundation.org. [Less]

The FreedomBox Foundation is just at the beginning of our efforts to collaborate with a worldwide community. We need to speak to everybody, everywhere, in their native language. That's why we're building translation into the project from the ... [More] beginning. Since most of our materials start out as video, the first step towards translation is transcription. If you speak English and want to help spread the message to a wider audience, please stop by the subtitle page to see what material needs transcription. If you speak any other languages in addition to English, we need your help on our translation team. We are organizing language-based groups to collaborate on high quality translations of project materials, both the transcribed videos and the various web pages and news items on the foundation's site. If you are interested, please email [email protected] or stop by the translate page for more details. We'll provide mailing lists and other communication tools to help make collaboration as easy as possible but we can't do this without your help. So email the FreedomBox Foundation at [email protected]. Tell us what languages you can help with. We'll put together teams. [Less]

The FreedomBox Foundation is just at the beginning of our efforts to collaborate with a worldwide community. We need to speak to everybody, everywhere, in their native language. That's why we're building translation into the project from the ... [More] beginning. Since most of our materials start out as video, the first step towards translation is transcription. If you speak English and want to help spread the message to a wider audience, please stop by the subtitle page to see what material needs transcription. If you speak any other languages in addition to English, we need your help on our translation team. We are organizing language-based groups to collaborate on high quality translations of project materials, both the transcribed videos and the various web pages and news items on the foundation's site. If you are interested, please email [email protected] or stop by the translate page for more details. We'll provide mailing lists and other communication tools to help make collaboration as easy as possible but we can't do this without your help. So email the FreedomBox Foundation at [email protected]. Tell us what languages you can help with. We'll put together teams. [Less]

The FreedomBox Foundation is taking steps to put this project firmly on its feet. Step One is fostering the community conversation that will steer this project to success. Toward that end, we're hiring a community relations facilitator. Please make ... [More] sure this ad reaches the right people. The FreedomBox Foundation seeks a motivated, talented, freedom-obsessed individual to facilitate community and press relations for the FreedomBox project. Responsibilities will include coordinating public and press outreach, organizing project events, managing our social networking presences, and consistent messaging. Prior experience in community relations, journalism, or PR is great, especially in the free software community. Previous experience with social media is strongly preferred and we encourage you to submit profile or other account names so we can see your previous work in the medium and your facility with the current tools. If the FreedomBox is the most important thing you want to be doing with your time right now, you are the person we want to talk to. To maximize efficiency and financial resources, a successful candidate will work with (and be paid by) both the FreedomBox Foundation and the Software Freedom Law Center. Please send resumes in an open file format (plain text preferred) to [email protected]. Salary will depend on experience and time commitment. [Less]

We've launched a new FAQ with answers to the most common questions we've been fielding over the past week. If you have been wondering how the foundation fits into the larger Freedom Box project or what our immediate plans for the Kickstarter please check it out.