Document Freedom Day 2011

Document Freedom Day (DFD) is a global day for document liberation. It will be a day of grassroots effort to educate the public about the importance of Open Document Formats and Open Standards in general.

Complementary to Software Freedom Day, we aim to have local teams all over the world organise events on the last Wednesday of March. This is the forth year that Document Freedom Day is happening, and we are again looking for people around the world who are willing to join the effort.

DFD's main goals are:

* promotion and adoption of free document formats
* forming a global network
* coordination of activities that happen on last Wednesday of March, Document Freedom Day

Once a year, we will celebrate Document Freedom Day as a global community. Between those days, DFD will be focused on facilitating community action and building awareness for issues of Document Freedom and Open Standards. We hope that you will join the DFD community. 

The European Parlement in Brussels is organising an event from 13h30-15h00 in Room PHS 4B001, European Parlement Brussels
Translation: FR/EN  - Please register before March 25th by sending your name and birthdate to: malika.benarab-attou@europarl.europa.eu

In the Paul-Henri Spaak building of the European Parliament (room 4B001), there will be an event on Open Standars to emphasize the opportunities offered by digital technologies to broaden access to culture in Europe and in the world. This will takes place from 1 to 3 p.m. and is organised by MEPs Malika Benarab-Attou, Indrek Tarand and Karima Delli.

The three following speakers are invited:

• Stefan Gradmann is Professor of Library and Information Science at Humboldt-University in Berlin with a focus on knowledge management and semantics based operations. He is also a leader of Europeana's technical work package on semantic interoperability and one of the main contributors to the Europeana Data Model (EDM). Previously, Stefan was director of the German Academic Publishers Project, and a technical co-ordinator of the EC-funded FIGARO project - both were concerned with Open Access. He was also an international advisor for the ACLS Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences, contributing to the report Our Cultural Commonwealth. The overall focus of his work is an integrated view of the scholarly information lifecycle. He puts emphasis on interoperability and open methods of modeling the scholarly information continuum - both in technical terms and in an e-scholarship perspective.
• Håkon Wium Lie is Chief Technology Officer of Opera Software. He proposed the concept of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) while working with Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau at CERN in 1994, CSS being one of the fundamental web standards, with profound impact on typography, aesthetics, and accessibility on the web. In 2006, Wium Lie started campaigning for browsers to support downloadable web fonts using common font formats. As of 2009, all major browser vendors except Microsoft have implemented web fonts this way.
• Kaido Kikkas is a Ph.D, Associate Professor at the Estonian Information Technology College and Associate Professor of Social and Free Software at Tallinn University, in Estonia. He is a researcher and free/open-source software (FOSS) enthusiast (or "academic hacker") and teaches a number of courses on various IT issues (ethical and legal aspects, FOSS development, security etc.).