Yesterday morning, the Free Software Foundation crashed the Windows 8 launch event in New York City. A cheerful GNU and her team handed out DVDs loaded with Trisquel, FSF stickers, and information about our new pledge, which asks Windows users to upgrade not to Windows 8, but to GNU/Linux.

Check out these great photos of the fun, and don't forget to sign our pledge!

Special thanks to our volunteers, Linnea the GNU and Tristan the photographer, for helping make this action a huge success!

Join the FSF and friends on Friday October 19th, 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!

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, a day to celebrate women's contributions to science and technology.

Last year, FSF executive director John Sullivan wrote, "these stories are an important way to simultaneously highlight both the under-representation of women in these fields and — based on the achievements of women who are in these fields — the potential we could realize if barriers to participation can be named and removed." This year, I want to take this thought and build on it.

Women face barriers to participation in science and technology fields starting at a very young age and continuing throughout their entire careers. Even women that manage to overcome enough barriers to make technology a career face so many challenges to advancement that drop-out rates are high. We have to acknowledge deeply rooted cultural biases here. To wit: a recent Yale study found that science professors presented with two equivalent resumes, one from "James" and one from "Jennifer", were much more likely to hire the mythical male applicant (they offered him a higher starting salary too). What's more, female professors shared this bias with their male counterparts.

Basically, we've got a big problem on our hands. I'm pretty sure this isn't news to anyone.

Here's the thing: even though there are even less women in computer science than in other STEM fields, and even though the number of women in free software may be even lower than that, I think the free software movement may be uniquely positioned to do something about it. Allow me to elaborate:

• The free software movement needs diverse participation to achieve its goals. If we want to make proprietary software extinct, we need everyone on the planet to engage with free software. To get there, we need people of all genders, races, sexual orientations, and abilities leading the way. That gives the free software movement a mandate to identify under-represented groups and remove their barriers to access.

• The free software movement values empowerment. The free software movement exists to empower people to take control of their computers and their data. We can apply this value to proliferate and support projects that give women and girls the experiences they need to overcome the cultural bias against women in technology.

• The free software movement is a community. One of the free software movement's strengths is a community built on collaboration. Free software folks are used to working together effectively, but we may require additional tools as our movement becomes more diverse. We can always do more to invite new people in, create safe spaces for them, and make their contributions visible so that they can inspire others to get involved.

It's that inspiration that Ada Lovelace Day is all about.

This Ada Lovelace Day, you can help to raise the profile of women in free software by nominating a woman for the Free Software Awards. Each year, the Advancement of Free Software award is given to an individual who has made incredible contributions to free software. There are plenty of women out there who fit the bill, and we need your help to make sure they will be considered for this year's award.

The FSF is currently accepting nominations for the 15th annual Free Software Awards. You can submit your nomination by emailing award-nominations@gnu.org, on or before Thursday, November 15th, 2012. For more details on submitting a nomination, visit: http://www.fsf.org/news/the-free-software-foundation-opens-nominations-for-the-15th-annual-free-software-awards

Today the Free Software Foundation is proud and excited to assist the GNU MediaGoblin project in its fundraising effort. MediaGoblin's volunteer team is working on a next-generation social web system where users will share their experiences through photos, videos and audio, all without running proprietary software. This project is ambitious, not just because it will support multiple media types, but also because it will use a special new network system called federation, which unifies a group of separately-owned servers into a single interface for the user. This means that anyone wishing to start a MediaGoblin server will be able to do so, optionally customizing the code to their needs and offering unique options to users.

Go here to donate to MediaGoblin.

Federation will also help MediaGoblin respects users' freedom and privacy in ways that traditional media-sharing Web sites generally do not. By removing data from a central source and allowing anyone to create their own instance of the system, federation encourages transparency and inclusion. This commitment to respecting its users comes at a time when online communications are increasingly threatened by intervention and censorship from governments and corporations, often with the help of the communications companies themselves. The MediaGoblin team and FSF have faith that the trust they build with users will draw people away from places like Facebook, Flickr and YouTube, as well as make MediaGoblin a hit in the free software community.

About MediaGoblin, and why they need our help

The MediaGoblin team is made up of about fifty part-time volunteers, led by project founder Chris Webber. They've made surprising progress in the year-and-a-half since the project's founding, but they need donors' help to perfect the system. If they reach their goal of $60,000, they plan to use the money to support a full-time project lead to organize volunteers and polish the project to a professional level. With this support and more hard work, Chris estimates that MediaGoblin will be usable within a year. MediaGoblin is offering donors goblin-themed items designed and made by Chris himself. Help out enough, and he'll even cook you a wholesome dinner at his home in Madison, WI.

To pitch in, go to http://mediagoblin.org/pages/campaign.html. Don't forget to pick a reward!

A new kind of media-sharing system

MediaGoblin's distributed system is called a federation because it will spread users' media across multiple servers, all running the free MediaGoblin software and communicating with each other. As compared to a system like Facebook, which is based in one set of servers controlled by a corporation, this system lets anyone set up a MediaGoblin server and hook into the network, making it very difficult for others to shut down all of MediaGoblin at once. In fact, StatusNet, a free software Twitter replacement with a similar federated system, has become popular in countries like Iran, where the state blocks Twitter to quash dissent. And the benefits of federation come at no cost to ease of use -- the programmers at MediaGoblin have designed the system to take information from multiple servers and combine it into one convenient interface for the user, making it just as easy to use as a traditional centralized media-sharing system.

We're developing GNU MediaGoblin because we believe user freedom is important, especially in the Web. More and more users are becoming trapped by proprietary, centralized media publishing systems where problems like automated censorship are becoming serious. We believe in the vision of the decentralized Web as a mechanism to empower people, and we want to bring that Web back! We're proud to be teaming up the Free Software Foundation in the fight to put power back into the hands of users. We've done a lot of good already, but we need your help to make this federated future a reality! --Chris Webber, MediaGoblin founder

As a GNU project, MediaGoblin gets support, publicity and advice from the FSF. Many famous programs have developed with similar assistance from the FSF, including the software behind the GNU/Linux family of operating systems and the GCC C compiler. Recently, the FSF has started accepting donations directed toward particular free software problem areas in need of development at https://my.fsf.org/donate/directed-donations/working-together. The FSF intends to offer this service and hosting for MediaGoblin-style fundraisers to more GNU projects in the future. FSF executive director John Sullivan has high hopes for MediaGoblin:

We're excited about the GNU MediaGoblin project, and we're thrilled to be providing its grassroots fundraising infrastructure. Without a doubt, we need a decentralized, free software system for sharing our photos and videos. We need a system that doesn't require using nonfree software or handing our memories and artwork over to a single point of privacy-violating, proprietary ownership-claiming failure. MediaGoblin can be that system, and its future users can make it so. I look forward to the result -- and to the example this could set for funding other critical free software projects. --John Sullivan, executive director of the Free Software Foundation

Almost thirty years ago, the free software movement was founded to make it possible to use a computer without compromising basic freedoms. Projects like MediaGoblin and StatusNet are part of the next phase of that effort, working to return to an Internet that respects and empowers people. The FSF believes that this new old Internet is needed now more than ever, as government intervention and corporate control is reaching a new peak. We can get to this vision of a free Internet faster by finding a way to fund these projects, which is why MediaGoblin needs your help. To donate to MediaGoblin (and claim some awesome rewards), go tohttp://mediagoblin.org/pages/campaign.html. Thank you.

You can check out MediaGoblin's blog post about the fundraiser here: http://mediagoblin.org/news/crowdfunding-campaign-launches.

For a formal press release from the FSF, see http://www.fsf.org/news/fsf-rallies-support-for-gnu-mediagoblin-to-make-media-publishing-free-as-in-freedom.