Join the FSF and friends today, Friday, April 10, from 2pm to 5pm EDT (18:00 to 21:00 UTC) to help improve the Free Software Directory by adding new entries and updating existing ones. We will be on IRC in the #fsf channel on freenode.

Tens of thousands of people visit directory.fsf.org each month to discover free software. Each entry in the Directory contains a wealth of useful information, from basic category and descriptions, to providing detailed info about version control, IRC channels, documentation, and licensing info that has been carefully checked by FSF staff and trained volunteers.

While the Free Software Directory has been and continues to be a great resource to the world over the past decade, it has the potential of being a resource of even greater value. But it needs your help!

If you are eager to help and you can't wait or are simply unable to make it onto IRC on Friday, our participation guide will provide you with all the information you need to get started on helping the Directory today!

This guest post was submitted by Daniel Dianes, a Spanish free software activist. Leer esto en español.

Unlike Twitter, which is controlled by a centralized authority, GNU social is a network of independent servers called nodes. Federation technology allows users to communicate between nodes, preserving the unified experience of traditional social media systems, and the free GNU social software allows anybody with an Internet connection to start their own public or private node and join the network. These administrators can even customize their nodes to suit the unique needs of their users.

Since GNU social is decentralized, it's harder for a company or government to censor content or shut down the network when they feel threatened by it. This is more than a hypothetical threat—it has been attempted multiple times by oppressive governments. Spreading out user data also makes bulk surveillance considerably more difficult, as there is no single database to crack into and copy.

Twitter user @Barbijaputa is popular in Spain, with more than 167,000 followers. She's known for criticizing the government or any other political parties or groups of power.

On January 14th, Twitter suspended @Barbijaputa's account after she participated in a conversation about sexually transmitted diseases. The next day, she created a profile on GNU social node Quitter.se and started posting. Her Twitter followers proved willing to follow her all the way to GNU social, and began joining existing nodes en masse and starting their own.

The growth was so explosive that the some of the existing GNU social nodes were unable to handle the traffic. On January 15th, a Quitter administrator posted this note:

"Due to high traffic, I need to stop the registrations for some time to get back in control. Has been a crazy day (15.01.15) on quitter.no and .is - -regards @knuthollund"

The node Quitter.es (Quitter Spain) was created to handle some of the extra people that overloaded existing GNU social instances like Quitter.no and Quitter.is. Quitter Spain now has 6,667 users and counting and Quitter.se reports 4,982 users, due in part to the incoming Spanish users.

GNU social is not the only federated social network challenging the centralized status quo. GNU MediaGoblin lets users publish images, videos, 3D models, and other files, Diaspora* provides a Facebook-like experience and pump.io is another option for microblogging. The Free Software Foundation runs a GNU social node at https://status.fsf.org.

Get started with GNU social today by picking from this list of nodes, and follow the Free Software Foundation at @fsf. Or try pump.io, and follow the FSF account @fsf there. Even if you don't have as many followers as @Barbijaputa, encourage them to follow you!

Daniel Dianes, FSF member #9171

Join the FSF and friends on Friday, April 3, from 2pm to 5pm EDT (18:00 to 21:00 UTC) to help improve the Free Software Directory by adding new entries and updating existing ones. We will be on IRC in the #fsf channel on freenode.

Tens of thousands of people visit directory.fsf.org each month to discover free software. Each entry in the Directory contains a wealth of useful information, from basic category and descriptions, to providing detailed info about version control, IRC channels, documentation, and licensing info that has been carefully checked by FSF staff and trained volunteers.

While the Free Software Directory has been and continues to be a great resource to the world over the past decade, it has the potential of being a resource of even greater value. But it needs your help!

If you are eager to help and you can't wait or are simply unable to make it onto IRC on Friday, our participation guide will provide you with all the information you need to get started on helping the Directory today!

With approximately 350 people in attendance, we kept pace with last year—with a few improvements. In particular, our tech team did a fantastic job improving our video feeds, with peak usage at around 300 simultaneous views. We also worked hard to streamline the registration process, reducing time spent waiting in the registration line before Richard Stallman's Saturday morning keynote, with few hiccups.

Let's take a look at some more highlights.

• Read our post about day one of the conference and the election of our newest board member, Kat Walsh.

• FSF board member Benjamin Mako Hill kicked off Sunday morning with an examination of how the free software community has progressed with two major goals: access and empowerment. He argued that empowerment has a long way to go, and offered some suggestions for next steps.

• This year, we had over 40 speakers, and like last year, about 40% were women.

• Karen Sandler, in her new role as executive director of the Software Freedom Conservancy, gave her third LibrePlanet keynote to close the conference, expanding on the recent suit brought by Christoph Hellwig, contributor to the kernel Linux, against VMWare for violating the GPL by not releasing the source code for the version of the operating system kernel they distribute with their ESXi software. Read our statement of support here.

• Sunday's talks explored the possibilities for free software: Jennie Rose Halperin of Safari looked at free software's potential role in cultural heritage organizations, Brett Smith discussed Arvados, a free software platform for big data science, Free Software Award-winner Sébastien Jodogne gave one of several talks on free software's role in medicine, and other talks looked at free software possibilities for universities and journalism, as well as examining threats to free software, gathering the community for strategy sessions, and offering practical training.

• Our sustained partnership with MIT's Student Information Processing Board once again helped make LibrePlanet great, thanks to the energy and enthusiasm of SIPB's membership.

We on the FSF staff owe many thanks to our tireless volunteers, without whom LibrePlanet couldn't possibly be as large or well-run as it is. Thank GNU to Francis Rowe of Gluglug and Libreboot, rsiddharth, Janith Perera, Sharon Ramage, Anke Nowottne, Mo Moulton, Diane Williams, Elyes Ighilaza, Brendan Kidwell, Rimma Shakhbatyan, Andy Zimolzak, Herm Pena, Taylor Gunnoe, Tanya Balyan, Devin Ulibarri, Ryan Desfosses, Geoffrey Jenkins, Martin Yim, Daniel Felix, Evan Mulvaney, Veronika Alexander, Patrick Engelman, Dan Fitzmartin, Ian Denhardt, John Saylor, Ben Cook, Sunil Kumar, Tim Jordan, Alice Alisme, Sunil Kumar, Julian Daich, Lizz van Allen, Kendra Moyer, Loren Chen, Helen Jiang, Max Dunitz, Mariah Villareal, Shayna Cummings, Matthew Coleman, Weston Cooke, and George Chriss. If you're interested in volunteering next year (you'll receive gratis admission and a t-shirt), please contact resources@fsf.org.

If you attended LibrePlanet and haven't filled out our feedback survey yet, please take a few minutes to do so. LibrePlanet is for you, and your ideas, compliments, and criticisms will help us make the next LibrePlanet even more productive, welcoming, and fun. If you missed a session, or want to share them with friends, keep an eye on the LibrePlanet video archive (powered by GNU MediaGoblin). We're working hard to get videos posted within a week or two, and we'll inform you when they're available.

We had a great group of sponsors this year and we are looking to build on that for next year. If your company would like to support LibrePlanet, please contact us any time at donate@fsf.org.

With the renewed energy that comes from spending a great weekend with the free software community, we're excited about the year ahead. Mark your calendars for October 3, when we'll celebrate our 30th anniversary, with events here in the Boston area and around the world. If you'd like us to let you know when registration opens for LibrePlanet 2016, join the announcements list (anchored at the top of the 2015 conference page) today. Remember that becoming an FSF member gets you gratis admission to the conference, and bragging rights for supporting the FSF's work year-round.

(Starting this month, Brandon is taking over for Karl Berry. Welcome, Brandon!)

• autoconf-archive-2015.02.24
• ccd2cue-0.5
• denemo-1.2.2
• gnats-4.2.0
• gnupg-1.4.19
• guile-sdl-0.5.2
• icecat-31.5.0
• libdbh-5.0.17
• libgcrypt-1.6.3
• libidn-1.30
• libtasn1-4.3
• nano-2.4.0
• parallel-20150322
• patch-2.7.5
• wget-1.16.3
• which-2.21

For announcements of most new GNU releases, subscribe to the info-gnu mailing list: http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/info-gnu.

To download: nearly all GNU software is available from http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/, or preferably one of its mirrors from http://www.gnu.org/prep/ftp.html. You can use the url http://ftpmirror.gnu.org/ to be automatically redirected to a (hopefully) nearby and up-to-date mirror.

This month, we welcome Alex Manoussakis as a new co-maintainer of GNU GNATS.

A number of GNU packages, as well as the GNU operating system as a whole, are looking for maintainers and other assistance: please see http://www.gnu.org/server/takeaction.html#unmaint if you'd like to help. The general page on how to help GNU is at http://www.gnu.org/help/help.html.

If you have a working or partly working program that you'd like to offer to the GNU project as a GNU package, see http://www.gnu.org/help/evaluation.html.

As always, please feel free to write to us, maintainers@gnu.org, with any GNUish questions or suggestions for future installments.