After Kickstarter

Posted 2011-03-25

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 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 join@freedomboxfoundation.org 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