• Bookmark the remote participation center now, and go there on Saturday, March 21st and Sunday, March 22nd to watch the livestream.

This year's program is bursting with something for everyone in the free software movement, from inquisitive newcomers to hardcore developers.

Keynotes talks will be given by Karen Sandler, executive director of Software Freedom Conservancy and GNOME Foundation board member; Benjamin Mako Hill, peer production scholar and activist; and the FSF's founder, Richard Stallman.

Another way to participate remotely is to join the conversation around the conference on the libreplanet-discuss mailing list. Subscribe now and dive in.

If you can make it to Massachusetts, it's not too late to register. Students and FSF members enjoy gratis admission. That means that, if you aren't already a member, this a great time to become one. Members enjoy a variety of benefits and support free software year-round.

So we can run the conference as smoothly as possible for everyone, we ask that you register by the end of the day on Tuesday, March 17th. However, late registrations and walk-ups will still be accepted.

Finally, we'd like to express our excitement about working with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Student Information Processing Board, our organizing partner for LibrePlanet 2015.

See you soon, whether it's in person or online.

Richard Stallman's latest article "Why We Need Free Digital Hardware Designs", published today in Wired magazine, addresses these questions. His clear and nuanced answers, which take into account both the world of today and the future we are building, show us how to ensure our freedom in both.

The new look of the site marks the completion of migration from a legacy system to CiviCRM, an actively maintained constituent relationship management system, which we run on top of Drupal. This launch was a team project. The improved look and feel of the membership system was aided by the effort of former outreach and communications coordinator William Theaker, whose knowledge of CiviCRM proved invaluable during development. System administrators Lisa Maginnis and Stephen Mahood have done lots of hard work to update and improve our hardware and system architecture to handle the traffic we've been receiving.

CiviCRM is the project that satisfied the requirements for a free software fundraising system on the High Priority Projects list, and was officially endorsed by the FSF in 2010. We love CiviCRM because it is more efficient and featureful than our in-house solution was, it uses the Affero General Public License, our contributions can benefit all of the organizations that use it, and likewise, we can benefit from the contributions of others. We use CiviCRM for managing memberships and for all of our nonmember donations, as well.

Our migration to CiviCRM changes how our membership system works. For instance, we have retired the old referral system. In the future, we will implement a new referral system, but for now, when creating a new membership, you will be able to fill out an "in honor of" section with referral information. We have also retired the member number system. Member badges now display the date you became an FSF member, rather than a unique ID number. If the old member button is embedded on your Web site, please update your site with the new HTML snippet displayed on your member benefits page. Potential new members will be interested to know that, because it is 2015, there is no longer an eight character limit on usernames! And of course, member benefits remain the same, including access to our XMPP (Jabber) server, email forwarding addresses, a 20% discount at the shop, and gratis registration for our annual LibrePlanet conference. If your membership is expired, you can renew via the same URL as before: https://my.fsf.org/renew.

The new member dashboard presents some information that wasn't previously available, such as your FSF event registrations and attendance, and your personal campaign pages. It's also possible to tweak more of your account information, such as your email format preference (plain text or HTML). Now that our basic migration to CiviCRM is complete, we will be adding new features to the site based upon CiviCRM's capabilities.

We know that this migration hasn't been entirely smooth sailing. We thank you for your continued patience as we deal with migration-related issues. Now that some of the dust has settled, we hope that you enjoy the new https://my.fsf.org! If you haven't yet, please log in and try it out. If you have any questions about your membership, please contact membership@fsf.org.

The FSF was selected as one of the 10! We were 8th on the list, just behind National Public Radio.

We received the news while I was meeting with our awesome technical team, hammering out our priorities for the next week and discussing the details of how we'll stream the upcoming LibrePlanet conference using exclusively free software. Our collective jaws dropped.

Thank you!

It is an honor to receive such a strong endorsement—and such trust—from the reddit community. It's also a responsibility, and we will use the money wisely.

As one of the smallest charities on the list, our staff of 13 works incredibly hard to win back your freedom as computer users; getting us closer to a world where all of what we need to do on all of our computers can be done, and done safely, using only free "as in freedom" software.

Since we are driven primarily by contributions from individuals (they were about 80% of the $1.02 million in support we received last fiscal year), this amount will make reddit one of our largest donors this year, right up there with TowardEX and the Markley Group, who generously donate just about all of our bandwidth and colocation space.

As this year is the FSF's 30th anniversary, we had set an ambitious goal of $525,000 for our winter fundraiser, which ended January 31st. We came up a bit shy then—but with this donation, we have actually exceeded that goal.

Thank you all for making this year extra-special for us! Now it's time to see how much more we can do for you.

Register now to join the free software community at LibrePlanet 2015.

If you register by Monday, March 9th, you'll be able to pick up a spiffy LibrePlanet 2015 t-shirt. And don't forget that FSF members get gratis admission—and help support free software year-round!

Read on if you'd like more information about volunteering, child care reimbursements, the program, the LibrePlanet email discussion list, or participating remotely.

Volunteering (get gratis admission!)

Volunteers are crucial to LibrePlanet, and we need more to make this year awesome. Give two hours or more of your time and you'll get gratis admission, a LibrePlanet t-shirt, and lunch. You'll choose from a wide variety of tasks including A/V and livestreaming management, visitor services, and speaker support. Get started by telling us your skills and interests through the quick volunteer application.

Child care reimbursements

We're happy to offer childcare reimbursements, so that you can come to LibrePlanet even if you've got young hackers at home. To apply or find out more, contact campaigns@fsf.org no later than Friday, March 6th.

Program

The program is up, so you can start thinking about which sessions you'd like to attend. This year's conference will be jam packed with great talks like "Fighting surveillance with a free, distributed, and federated net," "Style or substance? Free software is totally the 80's," and "Free software at the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences." Make sure you check out the social events, including the Friday night 30th Anniversary Open House—check the website for more details.

LibrePlanet starts on the list

Looking to coordinate travel with other LibrePlanet attendees? Brainstorm ideas for lightning talks? Organize a get-together after the conference? Join the libreplanet-discuss email list to connect with other LibrePlanet attendees. The list is active year-round as part of the libreplanet.org community.

Participating remotely

Even if you can't make it to Cambridge, you can still participate in LibrePlanet! We'll be livestreaming the conference and hosting an online discussion in real time, then posting all the session recordings online after the conference. Bookmark the remote participation page now: libreplanet.org/2015/live.

That's all for now! Hope to see you at LibrePlanet.